ELLIPSE ARTS CENTER

2010-08-25T14:11:00.001-04:00

The Ellipse Arts Center has reopened!

2009-02-24T12:04:00.001-05:00

Please come visit us. We missed you!
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Friday 11am–7pm; Saturdays 11am–2pm
Location: Ellipse Arts Center, one block West of the Ballston metro
4350 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22203
http://www.arlingtonarts.org/ellipseartscenter.htm

Crossing Glances: Regards Croisés Exhibition Reviewed in the French Media

2009-02-24T11:18:00.005-05:00

Photographer John Babineau on the Arlington Weekly News

2009-02-24T11:06:00.001-05:00

Crossing Glances: Regards Croisés Exhibition on the Arlington Video Network

2009-02-10T12:00:00.004-05:00

Crossing Glances: Regards Croisés reviewed in the Washington Post

2009-02-10T11:56:00.002-05:00

Click here to read the exhibition review written by Michael O'Sullivan for the Washington Post Weekend Section.

Crossing Glances : Regards Croisés reviewed in the Falls Chruch News Press

2009-02-10T11:44:00.004-05:00

Click here to read the review written by Kevin Mellema for the Falls Church News Press, Northern Virginia Art Beat.

Crossing Glances, Regards Croisés; Arlington & Reims : Sister Cities

2009-01-22T21:00:00.010-05:00

The evening of January 22, 2009 was opening night for the long-awaited exhibition Crossing Glances, Regards Crois és; Arlington & Reims : Sister Cities.

Exhibition book author Didier Rousselet writes, "two cities glance at each other, or rather each city invites one of its artists to serve as its eye on the other. A photographer comes from Reims to glance at Arlington; another comes from Arlington to do the same in Reims. And each of them returns home with his or her rich crop of photographs revealing overlooked features and hidden truths."

Artist John Babineau (right) speaks about his experience in Reims.

Artist Cécile Bethléem posing in front of her compilation of photographs, "Topology Fragment #15"

"Crossing Glances" author Didier Rousselet

Barbara Favola Chair of the Arlington County Board (left) and Norma Kaplan, Division Chief for Arlington Cultural Affairs (right).

Charles Daris, Head of Arlington Sister City Association (left) with ASL volunteer Sarah Ivory (right).

Anne Carpenter, Arts Management Specialist for Arlington Cultural Affairs (left) and Geoffrey Aldridge, Assistant Curator of Public Art for Arlington Cultural Affairs (right).

Please join us at the Ellipse for our upcoming events:

Copyright Basics for Professional Artists with John D. Mason of Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts on Thursday, February 5 from 7-9pm.

Book Signing and Discussion with Photographer John Babineau and Exhibition Book Author Didier Rousselet on Thursday, March 5 from 7-9pm.

Crossing Glances Opens at the Ellipse Arts Center

2009-01-14T18:45:00.010-05:00

Arlington Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Office of the City of Reims, France are pleased to present:

CROSSING GLANCES | REGARDS CROISÉS
Arlington & Reims : Sister Cities

Friday, January 23 - Saturday, March 28, 2009

Photographers: John Babineau of Arlington, Virginia and Cécile Bethléem of Reims, France

Image of Reims, France by John Babineau

Image of Arlington, Virginia by Cécile Bethléem

Location: Ellipse Arts Center, one block West of the Ballston metro.
4350 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22203
http://www.arlingtonarts.org/ellipseartscenter.htm
http://ellipseartscenter.blogspot.com

Exhibition book author Didier Rousselet writes, "Two cities glance at each other, or rather each city invites one of its artists to serve as its eye on the other. A photographer comes from Reims to glance at Arlington; another comes from Arlington to do the same in Reims. And each of them returns home with his or her rich crop of photographs revealing overlooked features and hidden truths."

EXHIBITION PROGRAMS Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 22, 6-9pm; exhibition remarks begin at 6:30PM
This event is an Art Eyes program and ASL interpreters will be present. Art Eyes is designed to create dialogue, art critique among peers and interpretation of artworks. Their mission is to empower the deaf community to become move involved in the visual arts. Targeted audiences include all artists, art lovers and art-curious.

Copyright Basics for Professional Artists with John D. Mason of Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts: Thursday, February 5, 7-9pm
Presented by Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, this workshop will cover the basic legalities of copyrights, trademarks and contracts for visual artists. John D. Mason is a Washington DC / Maryland based art and entertainment and intellectual property attorney. His practice focuses on copyright and trademark matters, litigation, contracts and commercial matters. He works with writers, artists and creative people and companies to protect and exploit their work and is also a literary agent. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Washington Lawyers for the Arts. The website for his new firm, The Intellectual Property Group, PLLC, is www.artlaws.com.

Book Signing and Discussion with Photographer John Babineau and Exhibition Catalogue Author Didier Rousselet: Thursday, March 5, 7-9pm
Didier Rousselet is an actor, stage director and writer. He holds a doctoral degree in theatrical studies. He founded and directed LE NEON French-American Theatre in Arlington for 17 years. Since 2004, Mr. Rousselet, who has taught history and geography, has been combining travels and writing projects.
John Babineau, is a fine art photographer specializing in street photography and a resident of Arlington, Virginia. After a three-year enlistment in the US Army in the late 1960s, John attended the New England School of Photography and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, graduating with a degree in photography and art education. He has taught photography to various age groups and skill levels. John has also exhibited in a variety of photographic venues including the Atlanta, Boston, New York and Washington, DC areas.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTISTS

Individual Artist Spotlight Grant Program For Visual, Media, Literary and Performing Artists: FY 2010 Grant Deadline: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 9:00PM

Spotlight Grants are intended to encourage Arlington-based visual, media, literary and performing artists to develop and present innovative new arts projects or programs that benefit Arlington County and its residents, increase access to an involvement in arts experiences for Arlington residents and to respond to diverse community needs.
Eligibility and Basic Guidelines for Spotlight Grants:
For legal residents of Arlington County, aged 18 or older.
For performing, literary, visual and media artists.
Total funding is $15,000, offering three grants for $5,000.
At least one public presentation is required during the 12-month grant period.

January 27th, 2009 is also the FY 2010 deadline for Challenge Grants (for small- and mid-sized arts organizations) and Festivals, Performances and Community Events Support.

For more information on Arlington Commission for the Arts and Arlington Cultural Affairs grant opportunities please visit http://www.arlingtonarts.org/cultural_affairs/funding.htm.

ELLIPSE ARTS CENTER
4350 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22203
One block West of the Ballston metro
Phone: 703.228.7710 TTY: 703.228.1855
http://www.arlingtonarts.org/ellipseartscenter.htm
http://ellipseartscenter.blogspot.com
ellipseartscenter@arlingtonva.us
Gallery hours: Wednesday-Friday 11am-7pm, Saturday 11am-2pm.
Garage parking: weekdays $3 with validation.
Garage parking is free & open late during evening events. All events are free and open to the public.

Ellipse Arts Center is a 3,000 square foot visual arts facility managed by Arlington Cultural Affairs. Our mission is to provide a diverse schedule of high quality programs in the visual arts, provide opportunities for visual artists and develop an engaged and appreciative audience. The Ellipse Arts Center will make accommodations for individuals with disabilities upon request (two weeks prior to the start of the program) and is accessible to people in wheelchairs.

Uncommon Beauty Artist Mary Coble in the Washington Blade

2008-12-03T16:59:00.006-05:00

Check out the Washington Blade’s November 14th, 2008 Out in DC feature of Uncommon Beauty artist, Mary Coble, titled Skin Deep by Shauna Miller. To find the review on line, follow this link, then click the icon/coverpage, go to page 48 and zoom in.

Here/now Artscape: Uncommon Beauty

2008-11-20T17:21:00.010-05:00

Watch the Here/now Artscape broadcast of Uncommon Beauty, with interviews by Juror, independent curator, critic, and ART in Embassies Program Curator, Sarah Tanguy, and artists, Jason Horowitz and Kay Chernush.

Arlington Public Art Upcoming Projects and Events

2008-11-20T13:01:00.002-05:00

Reception and Presentation: Corridor of Light Public Art Project Models by Artist Cliff Garten

Thursday, December 4, 7PM, at the Rosslyn Spectrum Theater, 1611 N. Kent Street, Rosslyn. 2 blocks from the Rosslyn Metro; Free parking in the building garage accessed from Arlington Ridge Road.

The public is invited to a reception at which artist Cliff Garten will be on hand to unveil the model for his "Corridor of Light" proposal of illuminated sculptures and light fixtures for Rosslyn's North Lynn Street corridor, sponsored by the Rosslyn Business Improvement District. This event is free and open to the public.

Arlington Public Art Upcoming Projects and Events

2008-11-20T13:00:00.000-05:00

Lecture: In Sight, In Mind, The Art of Sustainable Public Works
Speaker: William Morrish, Planner and Professor of Architecture, University of Virginia.
Introduction: Maurice Cox, Director of Design, National Endowment for the Arts

Thursday, December 4, 8PM, Rosslyn Spectrum Theater, 1611 N. Kent Street, Rosslyn. 2 blocks from the Rosslyn Metro; Free parking in the building garage accessed from Arlington Ridge Road.

William Morrish will be the keynote speaker at the Americans for the Arts conference on public art master planning and he will kick off the Planet Arlington and Architectural Speaker Series with a lecture on public art and the future of infrastructure design. He is the co-author of the "Phoenix Public Art Master Plan", a seminal work in the field of public art master planning. He will be introduced by Maurice Cox, director, Design, National Endowment for the Arts. This event is free and open to the public.

Art Eyes Happy Hour

2008-11-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

Art Eyes Coordinator Tabitha Jacques

On Thursday November 7th, 2008, Art Eyes Happy Hour at the Ellipse was a great success, thanks to Event Coordinator, Tabitha Jacques! After receiving a B.A. in Art History from Gallaudet University and a M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Georgetown University, Jacques recently began organizing Art Eyes events as a way to reach out to the hearing impaired art loving community.

Art Eyes is designed to create dialogue, art critique amongst peers and interpretation of artworks. Their mission is to empower the Deaf community and to become more involved with the Visual Arts. Targeted audiences include all artists, art lovers and the art-curious.

ASL interpreters were present at the event to translate for the three artists in attendance, Frank Hallam Day, Mary Coble and Jason Horowitz.

Frank Hallam Day (center left) and ASL interpreter Grace Hetrick (center right)

Mary Coble (left) speaking about her work 'Blood Script'

Jason Horowitz (center) commenting on the digital quality of his model's
blue contact lens in the photograph 'Gia No 2'

Tabitha Jacques (right) calling for a round of applause for the participating artists

The Ellipse would like to thank Tabitha Jacques for a wonderful evening! We hope she comes again soon for another Art Eyes event!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If you would like to connect with Art Eyes and get updates on the latest events, click on the link below to add them as your Facebook friend!

ART EYES Washington, DC

Catch the Beat!

2008-11-08T10:00:00.001-05:00

Uncommon Beauty was featured in the latest edition of the Northern Virginia Art Beat! Click below to read the full article written by Kevin Mellema for the Falls Church News Press:

Uncommon Beauty
Northern Virginia Art Beat

FOTOWeek/DC!

2008-11-07T19:45:00.010-05:00

The Ellipse Arts Center is participating in FOTOWeek/DC 2008!

"The week of November 15-22, 2008 will mark the launch of FotoWeek DC, the first annual gathering of a diverse and wide-ranging photography community in the nation’s capital, including photographers, museums, universities and all those involved in the profession across the metro D.C. area, including Virginia and Maryland."

- Courtesty FOTOWeek/DC website

Click on the link below to view a list of all participating galleries and museums:

FOTOWeek/DC
November 15-22, 2008

An Uncommon Beauty Featured in the Washington Post

2008-11-07T17:09:00.009-05:00

Don Zientara (left) and his grandson Saro Harvey (right).

Arlington's Wakefield High School student Saro Harvey was featured in the Washington Post in the article entitled "Owning His Gay Identity - at 15 Years Old" by Theresa Vargas! Pictured with his grandfather, Don Zientara, Harvey was a guest of the Ellipse Arts Center for opening night of Uncommon Beauty.

Don Zientara is founder of Inner Ear Recording Studio in Arlington, Virginia. He was featured with Cynthia Connolly in the latest issue of STOPSMILING Magazine. They would like to welcome everyone to one of the newest galleries in DC, the Civilian Art Project, for the STOPSMILING: DC Issue Release Party on Thursday November 13th, from 7-10pm.

Chess Players at the Ellipse!

2008-11-06T17:41:00.000-05:00

Good friends, Ron and Jerome, play chess in the gallery. Jerome, the Ellipse Arts Center parking attendant works the morning shift. We hope they come back again!

Discussion with Kay Chernush and Mary Coble

2008-10-16T19:00:00.021-04:00

On Thursday, October 16th, guests of the Ellipse Arts Center joined Kay Chernush and Mary Coble for a discussion entitled: Personal Identity and the Disjunction of Public Perception.

Uncommon Beauty artists Mary Coble (left) and Kay Chernush (right).

Kay Chernush explains her photographs entitled Self-Examination and how she established a new process of creating her work that she continues to use in newer projects.

Blood Script artist, Mary Coble, talks about the different stages of her project's development.

Uncommon Beauty: Opening Reception and Artists' Talk

2008-10-02T18:00:00.036-04:00

JUROR: Sarah Tanguy, independent curator, critic and ART in Embassies Program Curator
ARTISTS: Kay Chernush, Mary Coble, Frank Hallam Day, Jason Horowitz, Lucian Perkins and Athena Tacha

"…The six artists in Uncommon Beauty peel away taboos and biases to tackle the underpinnings of desire and self-worth. By isolating conventional loci of corporeal and ornamental beauty, their photographs and videos reveal a charged intersection of strength, beauty, and identity, with implications both personal and cultural. Alternate perspectives emerge that move beyond victimization and acceptance of fads to empowerment and liberation of the individual. While approaches to the subject vary, the power of transformation in each project fuels a tension between outer and inner beauty. None of them are set-ups or constructed realities, reflecting the artists’ self-conscious lens of raw honesty…" -Sarah Tanguy, juror

Please note: “Uncommon Beauty” exhibits photographs with adult content that may not be suitable for children. Parental discretion is advised.

Kay Chernush

Kay Chernush speaks about her work during the Artists' Talk.

Kay Chernush presents a series of self portraits that were created in an effort to renew a sense of beauty after a double mastectomy. "…Despite years of rebelling against such conventional notions of beauty, I was forced to confront my own vanity along with the fear of my own mortality…I used camera, computer, direct body scans and overlays to acquaint myself with my reconfigured body…" -Kay Chernush

Kay Chernush (left) converses with fellow artist Lucian Perkins (right). Artwork from left to right: "Reflection, Post-Op", "AC+T" and "Side Effect".

"Full Circle" hangs behind the artist and a guest.

"Fallout" by Kay Chernush.

Mary Coble

Mary Coble is a performance artist whose work reveals social stereotypes, especially those dealing with sexuality. "My goal is to make people question themselves, each other and our experience as a community that is part of a larger world. For Blood Script I chose 75 of those hateful terms and had them tattooed, without ink, onto the front portion of body in a very ornate script. After each word was completed, watercolor paper was pressed against the fresh incision and a blood impression was created. As a hate speech amassed on my flesh, the wall beside of me also filled with the hate speech." – Mary Coble

Mary Coble in front of "Blood Script".

Ellipse Arts Center Curator, Cynthia Connolly, modeling her 'photographic skirt' in front of Mary Coble's "Blood Script Performance Documentation".

Frank Hallam Day

While Traveling in Ethiopia, Frank Hallam Day noticed many hand-painted roadside signs advertising beauty salons. Intrigued by how the images were influenced by other cultures and seemingly foreign ideas of beauty, Day began a series of photographs that document these notions of ‘glamour’ amidst their desert surroundings. "The women represented are often ethnically indeterminate: sometimes clearly Caucasian, sometimes Asian. When they do resemble Ethiopians, their hair and clothing clearly reflect exotic foreign styles; they have bouffant hairdo’s, they wear white gloves and twirl strands of pearls in their fingers. In the poor farming towns and villages where I photographed these signs one suspects there isn’t much pearl twirling going on." – Frank Hallam Day

"Ethiopian Beauty Salon #71".

Jason Horowitz

The artist in front of "Gia No. 2".

Jason Horowitz’ incredibly zoomed in and blown up ‘slices’ of the human body, draw attention to enlarged pores, hair follicles, blood vessels around an eye and other seemingly mundane parts of our body that go unnoticed. These extreme views demand attention and at times leave the viewer blushing. "Playing with the tension between attraction and repulsion, the images reveal a hyper-realistic amount of detail about the subject and explore the relationship between photographic representation and painterly abstraction, the formal elements in tension with the emotional content of the subject matter. Their scientific/medical point-of-view is balanced by the intimate, personal, and sometime sensuous nature of the subject matter." – Jason Horowitz

"Gia No. 2" by Jason Horowitz.

"AnuRa No. 3" by Jason Horowitz.

Lucian Perkins

Widely known for his Pulitzer Prize winning body of photographs, Lucian Perkins has shifted over to video and mulitimedia work that compliments his ongoing love for traditional photography. Juror, Sarah Tanguy describes his piece Divine Divas as, “a humorous riff on the popular urban fairytale, Sex in the City. Asking which came first, the divas or the series, the multimedia project explores how a show can generate a group experience that validates individual feelings” – Lucian Perkins

Lucian Perkins speaks about his video, "Divine Divas" at the Artists' Talk.

Athena Tacha

Athena Tacha (right) points out the changes in her appearance over time

Athena Tacha’s work for this exhibition is a dedicated series of portraits documenting her aging process over the course of 36 years. A dramatic installation spanning an entire wall displays her almost scientific approach. "Looking at my face over the gap of some 40 years, I look like a wreck, but this is because I was used to my earlier face. My skin’s wrinkles and sags are due to all the work I did during these year. Would I give up everything I accomplished to have back my youthful beauty? No! And if I live long enough, I may acquire a new, different beauty." – Athena Tacha

"36 Years of Aging: 1972-2007".

* * *

Uncommon Beauty runs through December 13, 2008. Please note, we are closed the week of Thanksgiving and we close at 4pm on Friday, October 17.

Don't miss our upcoming events!

PERSONAL IDENTITY and the DISJUNCTION of PUBLIC PERCEPTION; A DISCUSSION WITH KAY CHERNUSH AND MARY COBLE: Thursday, October 16, 7–9pm

ART EYES HAPPY HOUR: Friday, November 7, 7–9pm

All are welcome to personally interact with select Uncommon Beauty artists as we connect the Deaf and Visual Arts communities. Art Eyes is designed to create dialogue, art critique amongst peers and interpretation of artworks. Our mission is to empower the Deaf community and to become more involved with the Visual Arts. Targeted audiences include all artists, art lovers and the art-curious. ASL interpreters will be present and parking is free/open late.

ASL interpreter, Grace Hetrick (left), Uncommon Beauty juror, Sarah Tanguy (center) and the originator of the Art Eyes concept, Tabitha Jacques (right).

When the Messenger is the Medium

2008-10-02T17:00:00.003-04:00

Essay by Sarah Tanguy, juror of Uncommon Beauty

In Twilight Zone’s “Eye of the Beholder,” an anxious young woman learns her surgery has failed, condemning her to a life of beauty in a piggish population, while in “Ugly Betty,” a gorgeous actress, made unattractive with braces and glasses, engages in the character’s quest for self-worth. Both examples from TV culture test the stereotype of equating a woman’s identity with her looks. In between these extremes, a realm of possibility opens where competing—and at times conflicting—standards of feminine beauty invite scrutiny.

Uncommon Beauty juror, Sarah Tanguy

The six artists in Uncommon Beauty peel away taboos and biases to tackle the underpinnings of desire and self-worth. By isolating conventional loci of corporeal and ornamental beauty, their photographs and videos reveal a charged intersection of strength, beauty, and identity, with implications both personal and cultural. Alternate perspectives emerge that move beyond victimization and acceptance of fads to empowerment and liberation of the individual. While approaches to the subject vary, the power of transformation in each project fuels a tension between outer and inner beauty. None of them are set-ups or constructed realities, reflecting the artists’ self-conscious lens of raw honesty.

Ellipse Arts Center volunteer, Frank Higgins, admires Frank Day's "Ethiopian Beauty Salon #79"

Dolled-up faces gaze at us through the bright palette and scratches in Frank Hallam Day’s Signs of Beauty, images of worn advertising signs for beauty salons taken along the roadsides of Ethiopia. Like an anthropologist, he is drawn to the signs not for their coiffures, make-up or jewelry, but for the layered, cultural disconnect they represent. Their features, most likely from outdated, glamour magazines and videos, are Caucasian, Asian and Ethiopian composites, rendered in varying degrees of pictorial sophistication and anatomical accuracy. Some have been mysteriously vandalized. Meant to please and attract, the images offer an unattainable dream that rural Ethiopians cannot read in context, leaving us to realize that “we” have become the exoticised “Other.”

Kay Chernush's "In My Dreams I Wear Satin and Lace"

In vivid contrast, Kay Chernush’s Self-Examination chronicles her bout with breast cancer, and addresses the loss of two potent carriers of feminine beauty—breasts and hair. Starting with In My Dreams I Wear Satin and Lace, we experience the power of the camera to transform the trauma of a double mastectomy and reconstruction and the fear of her own mortality into emotionally charged images of nuanced beauty. Digital and film snapshots of her body and scans of bandages and clothing are freely interwoven in the computer, producing a soft palette and radiating glow. In some, a hazy transparency takes on the melancholic aura of illness, with titles and text reinforcing ambivalent feelings about her altered reality and recovery. Scars become emblems of survival and hope, as we discover not a literal truth, but a story of growing at ease with a new self-image.

"Blood Script" by Mary Coble

Healing is also a theme in Mary Coble’s interdisciplinary Blood Script. In the antithesis of a red carpet performance, Coble stood vulnerable on a platform and invited viewers to write slurs on her body in New York, Washington, DC and Madrid. Later, she had the most common of them tattooed without ink onto her skin, and had contact prints made with blood as the medium. Through her stoicism, the stigma of hearing, voicing and receiving hate words is ritually cleansed, their derogatory meanings masked by the prints’ reverse lettering and blood smears. Instead the exquisite delicacy of their impressions and cursive font takes over. While the commingling of male and female epithets underscores the abuse of feminine beauty, Coble’s defiance of gender specific labeling urges for communal introspection.

Athena Tacha's "36 Years of Aging"

Like Chernush and Coble, Athena Tacha uses herself in the ongoing black and white series, 36 Years of Aging, which documents temporal change to her face and body. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the vertical bands form a processional frieze evoking the serial motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and the disturbing racial studies of the late 19th century. Though taken with near clinical precision, the project abounds in subtle variations. With each smiling and serious face, or straightforward body image, small wrinkles and sags, or graying hair creep in. Accumulatively, these markers make permanent the vicissitudes of her life even as they throw into relief our youth-crazed culture and challenge their negative implications for feminine, but not masculine, beauty.

Jason Horowitz in front of "Gia No.2"

In Jason Horowitz’s Corpus, everyday people willingly bare themselves to the camera in a manner of their own choosing. Using fashion lighting, he takes details of their anatomy and enlarges them into hyper-realistic, color prints. Their gigantism at once assaults our ideas of attraction and repulsion as we negotiate the ambiguous, fleshy landscapes that border on abstraction. Can a plucked eyebrow and smudged mascara, whose blue sheen echoes the letters of a contact lens, still beckon? Does a playful open mouth and nostrils, with lipstick line and facial hair exposed, spoil the anticipation of a kiss? Unlike other body-based work in the show, Horowitz’s anonymous portraits juxtapose vulnerability with exhibitionism, raising the complicating issue of voyeurism.

Video Still from "Divine Divas" by Lucian Perkins

Reality meets fantasy in Lucian Perkins’ Divine Divas, a humorous riff on the popular urban fairytale, Sex in the City. Asking which came first, the divas or the series, the multimedia project explores how a show can generate a group experience that validates individual feelings. We observe four women discussing the two “L”s—labels and love, as they, like their TV surrogates, reveal their personal tribulations and the bond of friendship. Even as their talk reinforces the stereotype of a confirmed “fashionista,” the ability to realize its downside checks their passion. With the unspoken innocence of childhood dress-up and role-playing in the background, they draw strength from knowing that aging fosters self-reliance and freedom of imaginative expression.

As a vision in progress, Uncommon Beauty seeks an expansion of attitude, a reclaiming of feminine beauty from the purveyors of diets, surgeries, and other so-called enhancements. The artists, as image brokers, encourage us, whatever our gender or sexual preference may be, to revisit standards—moving past the labels, biases and clichés toward acceptance of a more holistic, more authentic beauty.

Planet Arlington 2008!

2008-08-30T17:00:00.009-04:00

Planet Arlington's World Playground, took place over Labor Day weekend duiring the World Music Festival and featured educational workshops that inspired people to think twice about throwing away their garbage. The annual festival focuses on issues of immigration, globalization and the environment through the lens of the arts and humanities. Many of the workshops focused on the planet's resources and how to conserve them. By reusing materials, parents and children were able to make creative art objects. Led by professional artists from Virginia, New York City and the Washignton DC area, the World Playground drew hundreds of people to Iwo Jima Memorial Grounds in Rossyln to celebrate art, music and Planet Earth.

Artist Luke Idziak and Phoenix Bikes gave a workshop on making bike decorations out of reusable materials. Visitors could ride away with their unique creations made of colorful paper and blinking lights!

Luke Idziak's Bikeman kinetic sculpture.

Puppetmaster and magician David London gave an eye-opening performance called The Adventure to the Imagi-Nation. This inspired children to make their own puppets from reusable materials.

David London performing his Imagi-Nation Magic Show

Surrounded by fruits and vegetables from the Court House Plaza Farmers’ Market, DC artist Anita Walsh reminded people to look closer at the world they live in. Her Observe Drawing Project was a relaxing mixture of detailed instruction and cozy picnic blankets. Drawing en plein aire beneath the clear blue sky, visitors were welcome to pick their produce of choice and create beautiful color pencil renderings.

Delicious treasures from the local Farmer's Market!

Kristina Bilonick held a tee-shirt screen printing workshop called D.I.Y. Wardrobe Refashioning, proving that clothes can be recycled too! D.I.Y. stands for “Do it Yourself” and this activity was as hands-on as they get! Using a handmade silk screen set up and photo quality designs, everyone had a blast applying the ink and transferring the images.

Kristina Bilonick teaches the screen printing process.

Ellipse Arts Center Education Programmer, Lisa Marie Thalhammer and Director of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources, Dinesh Tiwari hang screenprinted T-shirts out to dry.

Across the World Playground, visitors could try on clothes from around the world with costumer Joan Lynch and the Global Closet. Virginia artist, Greta Gonzales created unique face painting designs especially for Planet Arlington, turning children into colorful tigers, cheetahs and butterflies! This fit right in with Nai Davis’ Musical Safari, where children could learn about instruments from far off places.

Carolina Mayorga’s Stuffed Paper Animals project had parents and children making penguins, mandarins, butterflies, fish and grizzly bears. Filled with shredded paper and 100% recyclable, these cute, paper toys were a popular activity.

Carolina Mayorga's Stuffed Paper Animals tent.

Carolina Mayorga (right) selecting a paper fish for the Children's Stage decorations.

Ellipse intern Jamillah Abdullah (left) and Cultural Affairs' Darlene Robinson (right)

With so many workshops to choose from and so much music to hear, Planet Arlington’s World Playground is the highlight of summertime in Rosslyn.

See you next year!

Pondering those who ponder

2008-08-06T18:23:00.027-04:00

Amidst the diversity of art currently on display at the All Arlington Salon, each work engages the viewer. Whether a serene landscape or a vivid abstraction, the works can invigorate the senses, evoke memories, or reveal a story.

(left)

Frederick Markham

Rose Garden, 2007; Oil on canvas

(right)

Alice Whealin

Pearly Water’d, 2006; Oil on canvas

A number of works in the exhibit add a twist to the contemplative nature of viewing art: they feature subjects who are lost in their thoughts. What do we think as we gaze at someone with a discernable personality, with an independent psyche? Naturally, we want to know what they are thinking and we desire to know more about the situation. Artists in the Salon bravely took on this difficult theme, sometimes providing clues and other times complicating straight-forward conclusions.

Lucia Heard not only includes a pondering figure in her painting, Elizabeth in Iceland, but she also tinges the background with a degree of mystery. Here, a graceful, white-haired woman stands as if uncertain of her surroundings.

Lucia Heard
Elizabeth in Iceland, 2007; Oil, 22” x 28”

In her artist statement, Heard remarks that she concentrates on color arrangements. The icy blue sky and weathered grey and green houses crisply contrast the bright red roofs and jacket of the woman. The lively colors and wholesome picket fence suggest that this should be an idyllic setting, but the woman’s defensive stance suggests that she has either been anxiously pacing or waiting. Heard skillfully incorporates shadows into the composition, recalling Edward Hopper’s equally enigmatic plays with light and darkness. For instance, the woman casts an ominously dark shadow onto the pastel fence. Unlike Hopper’s blank but detailed faces, Heard has obscured the woman’s face with hurried strokes of paint. The viewer is not meant to easily decipher her thoughts.

Ellen Price Egan
Lost, 2001; C print, 20” x 30”

Where Heard creates a psychological feeling of anxiety by portraying a lone woman, Ellen Price Egan relies on a crowd. Her photograph, Lost, consists of overlapping images of the city. Egan has carefully layered bright colors and a multitude of people into a composition that is beautifully frenzied. Yet, as the title indicates, these attributes are not necessarily positive. Either Egan has lost her way after a creative photographic journey in the city or her title refers to the indifferent expressions of the passersby. Regardless, she has captured the core of social isolation: a mass of people lost in their own thoughts for better or worse.

Kent O’Connor
Dog Suit, 2008; Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”

Kent O’Connor’s Dog Suit establishes a more conversational relationship with the viewer. The male subject, with a slightly furrowed brow, angular facial features, and a five-o-clock shadow meets the gaze of the viewer. If not for the spotted sweatshirt and floppy ears, one might perceive the figure to be a boxer hoping to intimidate his next opponent. Indeed, the dog suit adds a layer of meaning to his thought-process: perhaps he is more embarrassed than angry, though the balance is tenuous. Because of this tension, a viewer can sympathetically return his gaze, assured that someone else will pay the consequences for dressing him in a dog suit.

Bryanne Dade
Adam, 2006; Oil, 24” x 30”

Conversely, peering at someone who is asleep has long intrigued the voyeur in us all. Brianne Dade has painted Adam reclining on a sofa with his eyes shut, eschewing the presence of the viewer. Comparable to Heard’s painting, the well-executed contrast in colors creates a feeling of uneasiness as the maroon pillow exacerbates the eerie yellows of Adam’s face. Dade emphasizes Adam’s face and upper torso by cropping out the rest of his body. Forced into an intimate space with such a dynamically portrayed subject, one cannot help wondering what he might be dreaming. To be sure, Dade could have merely painted Adam while he had the flu. However, the intense colors and Adam’s vulnerable position suggest that Adam is experiencing a disturbing slumber. Dade has cleverly established an overall feeling of agitation.

Emma Sky Wolf
The Dreaming Seat, 2008; Ink, acrylic and digital media, 16” x 20”

For Emma Sky Wolf, a sleeping figure can appear peaceful. In The Dreaming Seat, soothing tones of grey, teal and blue suggest harmony. Furthermore, the young girl smiles in her sleep, making clear that her dreams are pleasant. Her exact location is uncertain, possibly in her own backyard or on a park bench. The painting does not need to include such details; rather, a seemingly limitless blue sky cushions the girl and encourages her daydreams.

What sense can be made of pondering others as they ponder? As we attempt to interpret the tacit elements of a painting, we begin to connect to them in unexpected ways. The All Arlington Salon includes many more paintings that incite open-ended questions. Despite the impressive number of works and their range in subject matter, size and medium, visitors can search for thematic threads that run throughout the gallery and unite the artists of Arlington.

The Story Behind the Bird...

2008-07-31T19:00:00.000-04:00

Alex Zealand, the artist behind the lacey grapevine wonder, The Abscence of Flight, blogs about the story behind her work and her experience at the All Arlington Salon! As an installation artist, Zealand discovers the emotional side of disposable objects and brings out thier un-realized potential. Read Alex Zealand's Blog: "Install This"!

www.alexzealand.blogspot.com

The All Arlington Salon Opening Night!

2008-07-31T18:00:00.028-04:00

Yellowthroat by Western Muntain

The evening of July 31st was opening night for the All Arlington Salon 2008! The gallery was buzzing with excitement when over five hundred guests poured in, ready to share the experience of participating in the Ellipse Arts Center’s annual exhibition. Not surprising, this year’s show proved to be yet another success! By showcasing the works of two hundred and twelve Arlington affiliated artists, the All Arlington Salon represents the multitude of talented people who live, work, have a studio or study in Arlington County, Virginia.

(Photo: courtesy of Britt Conley)

The room was overflowing with artists and guests!

(Photo: courtesy of Britt Conley)

“This is the best salon show that I’ve been in and seen ever!” says Antonios Sotiros Perros, a six-time All Arlington Salon participating artist. Commenting on his tour of the Ellipse, Perros believes, “…artists should have a good solid drawing background…and this is what I’ve seen so far in this art show.”

A Good Read by Dana Saxerud.

Paintings dominated this year’s salon, seconded by photographs and finally sculptural works. Acrylic being the most popular weapon of choice, the myriad of paintings shift in focus from urban landscapes, to intimate portraits of family life. The pieces range from the oddly humorous to the mysteriously quiet, such as A Good Read by Dana Saxerud.

Little Virgin by Jeannette Herrera.

The hand-pulled prints, patchwork quilts and tile mosaics are worthy of notice, as are the two dioramas, Mail Art 2 and Little Virgin by artists Jennifer Beinhacker and Jeannette Herrera. Beinhacker’s babydolls are housed in an attic-like atmosphere filled with secret messages and personal meaning, while Herrera’s fresh look at a familiar religious icon is sprinkled in gold.

The artist and her artwork. Britt Conley and Miss. Sloan. (Photo: courtesy of Eileen Ryan)

A view of the gallery with Trepanation Blue and Foot/Ankle.

Adjacent to the larger-than-life charcoal drawing Foot/Ankle by Kevin Mellema (far right) are equally stunning digital photographs and paintings by artists who share Mellema’s eye for capturing vivid motion in two dimensions.

Crowned with antlers and tattooed with swirling birds, Lee T. Wheeler’s Trepanation Blue (far left, hanging) combines found objects and painting to create a poetic sculpture. “I awoke with birdsong in my head,” reads the first line of his poem. As a trained tattoo artist, Wheeler’s unique style certainly adds personality to the exhibition.

The terracotta bust by Liz Musil, entitled Listening, is a fine example of the extraordinary detail present in the art displayed. Attention to detail seems to be an ongoing theme in this year’s salon.

A view through The Absence of Flight by Alexandra Zealand.

The Absence of Flight by Alexandra Zealand begs you to look closely at the intricately woven grapevines and see the beauty in something ordinarily discarded.

A collection of crafts and crocheted handiwork by members of the Harvey Hall Community Center.

The flamenco guitarist serenading the crowd.

The All Arlington Salon runs from August 1st to September 13th. Gallery hours are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 11am – 7pm and Saturdays 11am – 2pm.

This is your chance to discover something new! Get inspired, don’t miss it!

Countdown to the All Arlington Salon!

2008-07-17T14:00:00.010-04:00

There are only two weeks left before opening night of the Ellipse Arts Center’s annual exhibition, the All Arlington Salon! On July 17th, the day of the drop-off, Arlington artists came through the gallery doors with ready-to-hang photographs, paintings, mixed media collages and 3-D sculptures. By mid-morning, the walls were filling up with rows of original artworks. From graffiti inspired pieces, to charcoal drawings, to hand-pulled prints, the wide spectrum of artistic styles represent Arlington’s diversity.

Paintings by Brit Conley and other artists.

The All Arlington Salon is open to all artists who live, work, study or have a studio in Arlington, Virginia. Artists have the opportunity to submit each year. Every other year a guest curator juries the show, but this year there is no juror! Regardless of style or medium, Arlington affiliated, artists 18 years and older are welcome to submit one artwork.

Artists Vicky Kirby (left) and Bev Hansen (right) previewing the show.

The opening reception will be held on the evening of July 31st, 2008 from 6:00 – 9:00pm. Parking is free and open late the night of the reception. The exhibition will be on view from August 1st to September 13th. Gallery hours are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 11am – 7pm and Saturdays 11am – 2pm.

Here/Now Artscape Features The Thread as the Line!

2008-06-04T17:30:00.003-04:00

Watch an in depth interview with The Thread as the Line curator, Cynthia Connolly.

Artscape is a regular broadcast promoting cultural events in Arlington. Copy and paste the link into your browser to view more videos!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXmv0lEs9UI

Redefining the Line in the Washington Post

2008-05-23T18:00:00.001-04:00

On Friday, May 23, 2008, The Thread as the Line was featured in the Arts Section of the Washington Post. In the article, “The Fabric of Freedom, Redefined,” art critic Jessica Dawson asks, “Why draw a line when you can sew one?” The myriad of artists exhibiting in the show answer her question each with a different approach. From Jennifer Boe’s embroidered commentary on feminine domestic roles to Sabrina Gschwandtner’s video documenting “art as social interaction”, The Thread as the Line, “reveals how fabric – once a signature feminist material…entered an art world whose definition grows broader by the day.”

KNITTING JAM with LAURE DROGOULS'S APPARATUS FOR ORCHESTRAL KNITTING

2008-05-15T11:32:00.019-04:00

In conjunction with THE THREAD AS THE LINE exhibit:

A night of amplified knitting with Baltimore-based artist and Sondheim Prize winner, Laure Drogoul!

Laure Drogoul sets up for an evening of "productive" music. Ellipse gallery visitors, hard-core knitters and new-comers alike, had an amazing time contributing to Drougoul's newest project.

Thank you to everyone who came!

Educational Programmer, Lisa Marie Thalhammer (left) and Laure Drogoul (right) are knitting while Thread as the Line artist Sabrina Gschwandtner (center) films in Super8 film (!!!)

Supplies for ORCHESTRAL KNITTING include a soundboard, yarn and knitting needles.

A knitting orchestra in progress. Drogoul organizes the participants in a traditional knitting circle, providing them with needles equipped with tiny microphones. Working from the same pattern or “score”, the knitters create recordings of scarves or mittens as manifestations of each performance

Read more about the story behind Drogoul's crafty music in the City Paper online!

Knitters hanging out by Sabrina Gschwandtner's installation, KnitKnit Sundown Salon. The video highlights her limited edition magazine and newly published book, "KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects form Knitting's New Wave".

Click here to read more about Amplified Knitting in the Craft e-zine!

View a YouTube video of her first musical knitting recording at the fabulous Baltimore store, Atomic Pop!

ORCHESTRAL KNITTING Hits the Post!

2008-05-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

Thursday May 15, 2008

Laure Drogoul’s “Apparatus for Orchestral Knitting” was featured in the

Style on the Go section of the Washington Post!

In the article, “Weaving a Tapestry of Sound”, journalist Lavanya Ramanathan highlights the musical event as part of the Ellipse Arts Center’s The Thread as the Line show. Visit our Projection Annex, located next door to the gallery, to watch a video of previous performances!

Read more about the Ellipse Knitting Jam at the Washington Post website! The Thread as the Line runs through July 12, 2008.

SEW WHAT? Ellipse Makes the Cover of Bust!

2008-05-15T07:00:00.001-04:00

Hurry to get your copy of the June/July issue of Bust Magazine! The Ellipse Arts Center made the front cover for The Thread as the Line. In the article “A Stitch in Time”, journalist Susan Beal unravels the life stories and influences of a few of our featured artists:

Caroline Hwang, Jennifer Boe, Megan Whitmarsh and Anila Rubiku.

“A Stitch in Time” is rich with color photographs and is a sure read for anyone who wants to know more about the Contemporary Sewn Art Movement which has taken the nation by storm!

THREAD AS THE LINE : Contemporary Sewn Art - Opening Reception and Artist Talk

2008-05-02T18:00:00.024-04:00

Exhibiting the work of sixteen local, national and international artists, “The Thread as the Line” exposes the expanding interest in using traditional sewing and embroidery in contemporary fine art.

Curated by Cynthia Connolly

THE STORY: In 1999, Cynthia Connolly visited New York City to hock her postcards at various stores. One store stood out in particular, Patch 155. The handmade clothing shop was a beehive of activity for people wanting to sew and create. It featured the work of up-and-coming artists and designers. It was here that Cynthia was inspired to sew her photographs which lead her artwork in a new direction. She quickly became friends with Patch 155's owner, Cal Patch, and till this day, she visits every time she goes to New York. After returning home, Cynthia continued to notice how the medium of sewing in fine art continually grew. This exhibition is a document to this movement.

Jennifer Boe

Above: Jennifer Boe (b. 1978 Niles, Michigan) earned a BFA in painting and Creative Writing from the Kansas City Art Institute. She currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri. After graduating, she “fell out of love from painting”. She felt it too fast for her and moved into embroidery. Yet in spite of having wholly abandoned brushes and canvas, she still refers to herself as a painter. Her new work is heavily influenced by her mother’s craft projects and her grandmother’s gifts of embroidered linens. Boe believes, “there is a distinction between and a hierarchical ordering of fine art over craft, which solidified about the time of the renaissance; ‘Art’ being strong, masculine and educated; ‘craft’ being weak, feminine, domestic and amateur.”

In The Thread as the Line, red velvet draperies swing open to reveal Boe's dramatic triptych, Immaculate Mary Full of Grace. The embroidered vacuum cleaner is adorned with cherubs, roses and a star-spangled halo. Upholstery attachments hang on either side as companions to the life-sized piece. "In spite of feminism," Boe comments, "the rugs still need to be vacuumed, the dishes washed and the groceries bought…cleanliness is akin to godliness." Speaking of groceries, her other two works: Devilied Fun for Everyone and She's No Angel, bring out the humor in everyday purchases that we often overlook.

Natalie Chanin

Above: Thread Stories, a repaired and preserved a quilt, hangs beside her book Alabama Stich. The repaired and preserved vintage quilt illustrates the bond between our past, our present and future. This work serves as canvas for oral histories – collected from local textile workers over the last eight years.

Born in Florence, Alabama, Natalie Chanin re-established her studio in Alabama after 22 years of living and working abroad as a costume designer. She earned a degree in Environmental Design from North Carolina State University and currently has her hands full working as a designer, manufacturer, consultant, stylist, filmmaker, mother, artisan, cook and collector of stories. Chanin's past clothing line, Project Alabama, was sold in national and international retail stores. She recently founded Alabama Chanin, where artisans from local Alabama communities contribute their talents constructing clothing, home furnishings and accessory designs by combining new, organic and recycled materials.

Steve Frost

Above: Detail of Steve Frost's "Never Too Old for Single Stall Bathrooms", and his comfortable installation titled, "My Family Has Slept On This Couch". The work features twelve cushy "Ex-Boyfriend Pillows". Here, Frost lounges on his installation with textile artist, Kristina Bilonick.

Steve Frost (b. Woodsville, NH) lives and works in Washington, D.C. In 2004, he completed his BFA at Alfred University's New York State College of Ceramics. His intricate work from his Merit Badge Series became part of a free speech controversy in Krakow, Poland. Frost and other members of the feminist collective, The Evolutionary Girl's Club, launched an exhibition as part of Poland's Festival of Tolerance. The festival and exhibition drew crowds of protesters and resulted in the destruction of many of Frost's works, which confront themes of gender, heritage and the history of materials. In The Thread as the Line, Frost exhibits wall mounted fabric panels and a reupholstered couch which tell “tales of heartache” constructed from the “socks, underwear and t-shirts from men he may or may not have had break his heart.”

Anila Rubiku

Above: Anila Rubiku speaks about her Mastering Freedom series. Born in Albania, Rubiku left her home country in 1994 to study at the Brera Academy in Milan. This new beginning inspired her to reexamine many aspects of her life, including her identity as an Albanian female artist, her core values and roots.

In 2004, Rubiku began using thread as a way to reconnect with her homeland. She writes, "Embroidery is a simple and humble medium practically forgotten in Albania, but which has for generations been a part of my roots and family history, which is made up of women and feminine sensibility in a society where men call all the shots."

Thread as the Line exhibits her recent work, Mastering Freedom, which depicts women in designer dresses boldly standing on unbridled horses. As if to comment on a woman's place in a male dominated world, these women seek to tame the "male power" in the stereotypical feminine way. Her intricate embroideries represent freedom, perserverance and aspiration - things Rubiku has experienced as a foreigner in Italy and a foreigner to her homeland.

Anila Rubiku’s work appears courtesy of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC.

Graham Childs

Above: detail of Graham Childs' Stadium 1, along with the artist explaining its historical significance. Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Childs lives and works in Washington, DC. He recently graduated with a MFA from American University. His work deals with the societal expectations of gender distinction. Childs confronts, accepts and takes ownership of stereotypical gender roles by combining the elegant craft of embroidery and the grace of the artifact. “My work is a celebration; it becomes icons of innocence and strength struggling against time to stay frozen in memory and is about rejoicing the truths that we all share as human beings.” In The Thread as a Line, Graham exhibits “cardhouses” made from original 1989 Giant’s baseball cards. 1989 is the year that a major earthquake struck in the middle of the World Series game at the Giant’s home, Candlestick Park.

Brece Honeycutt

Above: Brece Honeycutt explains the meaning of her larger-than-life skeins of original homespun. Born in Hickory, North Carolina, Honeycutt makes history-based drawings, sculptures and installations. She received an undergraduate degree in Art History from Skidmore College and a MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

Her works are often collaborative installations placed in public spaces such as university campuses, historical houses, non-profit spaces and inner-city parks. Currently, Brece is spinning yarn in Arlington, Virginia and recording the memories of fiber, thread and spinning told to her by passers-by. For The Thread as the Line her tactile installation includes these digitally recorded interviews, as well as a hypnotic video of the spinning process.

Jennifer Muskopf

Above:Jennifer Muskopf speaks about her installation of mysterious deep sea fishes. Lophius Piscatorius or Monkfish and Bathysaurus Mollis or Lizardfish float in the darkened room.

Born in Millstadt, Illinois, Muskopf has lived in Washington, DC; Barbados, West Indies; Brooklyn, New York and Carrboro, North Carolina with her anthropologist husband. She has exhibited internationally and studied at Kansas City Art Institute. Muskopf creates “soft sculptures” of handmade stuffed animals interacting within their environment. She describes her works as, "quiet, detailed scenes depicting the strangeness of ordinary objects around us. Plants stand sentinel. Clouds communicate with their grounded shadows. Animals escape our boundaries."

In The Thread is the Line, Muskopf has installed her soft sculptures of life-sized deep sea fish in a closed off, dimly lit space in the gallery in order to emulate and transport the viewer to the deep sea where these monsters lurk. When discussing her fascination with the sea, she explains, "I want to represent the creatures that really exist there. I am making life-sized stuffed animal versions of these monsters in an attempt to know them. To have them share our space. To know how big they are next to me. To imagine what it is like in their space. To look closely at what is in our world but still beyond our understanding.”

Sabrina Gschwandtner

Above: Frank Higgins watches Sabrina Gschwandtner's "KnitKnit Sundown Salon" video installation. Her book, "KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting's New Wave" brings together a community of 27 knitters under an expanded definition of what art is. Her work in The Thread as the Line explores themes of tactility and community while engaging the spaces between craft and art, hobbyist and professional, artist and curator.

Gschwandtner is a New York City based artist who works with film, video, photography, performance, sewing, crochet and knitting. She has a BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University, an MFA from Bard College and has exhibited internationally. In 2002 she founded Knitknit, a limited edition arts journal dedicated to the intersection of fine art and handcraft. Since then, she has curated numerous shows and events around performative and political textiles, effectively creating a community of artists, artisans and crafters whose work defies categories of fine art or craft.

Valerie Molnar

Above: Valerie Molnar talks about her site specific installation, They're Kissing Again. Ohio native, Valerie Molnar lives in Richmond, Virginia and will complete her MFA in painting at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in May 2008. Deviating from using paint as a medium, Molnar’s main focus has become knitting. Using the wall as her canvas, she still paints “overlaps” of color on her tacked-up knitted compositions. "The way these two constructs work together as a team is that the brightly colored images and forward scale grab the attention and the familiar and non-threatening nature of the material (yarn and knitting) pulls people in closer, whoever they might be… Ideally the two, paint and knitting, should flux between being inseparable and separate. ”

Thomas Campbell

Above:Thomas Campbell's collection of sewn paintings, rich in color and filled with details that will make anyone take a second glance. Campbell currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, but he travels all over the world creating work in the places that he prefers to be, usually near an ocean where he can surf. He spends his days creating 16mm films, making paintings and acting as creative director of his small independent record label; releasing music by contemporary artists including Tommy Guerrero, Ray Barbee, Peggy Honeywell and Black Heart Procession.

Curator Cynthia Connolly knew of Campbell’s work from her days hanging at Cal Patch’s New York City store front. She watched it develop over the years, becoming more complex. He combines broad, fast strokes with layers of small details including “combined scribbles and scriptures, taking slogans and anecdotes from a unique vocabulary and juxtaposing them with a profound look at human nature.” In 2004, Cynthia found out that Campbell was using sewing as a medium and The Thread as the Line features his newest sewn paintings.

Photograph of Large Sewn Flower by Jeffrey Scott Goldberg.

Natalia Blanch

Above: Natalia Blanch's Feu Rouge installation over her steel filing cabinet installation of Minimum Drawings. Born in Argentina, Blanch earned her BFA from the National University of Córdoba in 1996 and an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000. She now lives in Grenoble, France.

Blanch exhibits internationally and has recently been featured in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. In The Thread as the Line, her vintage steel filing cabinet contains a collection of 4"x6" cards. Using various papers, paint, thread and photographs, she created her Minimum Drawings. "The first drawings (first three months of work) are notes about the Iraq war. The following ones are representations of everyday events that impress me and that belong both to my own personal reality and to the world’s." The viewer is welcome to go through the filing card box and examine them.

Megan Whitmarsh

Above: detail of Megan Whitmarsh's Art Museum. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Whitmarsh has a MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. She has recently exhibited in the United States, Spain, Belgium, Iceland, Canada, Korea, Germany and Switzerland. She lives in Los Angeles, a place where nature and the constructs of man collide with rawness as buildings, trash and pavement confront the sandy dry Southern Californian soil.

In her sewn canvases, Whitmarsh transforms, “the multiplicity of ordinary life into magical yet accessible moments. My work displays scenes of fantasy characters existing amongst the detritus of the modern world.’’ Her brightly colored embroideries tell stories through the cast of tiny schoolchildren and yetis. The spare backgrounds are dotted with iconic landscape features such as volcanoes, caves, crystals and forests.

Work appears courtesy of New Image Art, Los Angeles, California.

Zac Monday

Above: A candid photograph of Zac Monday assembling Beast 'Blue' on installation day. Zac Monday is a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) sculpture program graduate, currently enrolled in the University of California at San Diego’s MFA program. The year before he entered VCU, his mother taught him to crochet. From then on, began designing face coverings that ultimately became “masks that covered the entire body”. When his actors wear his costumes, they invade the viewers’ physical space. Monday states, “I get really bored entering an art show with all of the art caged to the wall or on the floor - making it totally inaccessible to our physical presence. I want to challenge the viewers experience with the art, making it somehow not as safe.” His companion to Beast 'Blue', a full body crochet costumes exhibited in its "vacant” state is featured in The Thread as the Line show.

Rachel Bernstein

Above: Shleves of Rachel Bernstein's fluffy dissections and a detail image of 3 Small Intestines. Born in La Jolla, California, Bernstein grew up surrounded by medicine and visual art. Her time spent volunteering in a children’s ward of a local hospital greatly influenced her artistic career. After receiving a BA in Philosophy from NYU, she studied figure, animation and sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis Missouri.

Bernstein's sculptural work envelopes the skill of creating life-like renditions of human anatomy parts that explore the borderline between the beautiful and the grotesque. “Inner organs are often presented as a subject of horror or perhaps clinical interest but organs are as beautiful as the contours of our exteriors.” Using organic materials and needlepoint, she depicts components of the digestive, circulatory and muscular systems. She explains that these materials, “have been denigrated as craft media, rather than media of fine art. I reclaim these marginalized mediums by using them to depict things that have traditionally been displayed in medical academies rather than ladies' dressing rooms.”

Matt Nelson

Above: Arlington's own Matt Nelson and detail of Marshmallow Peep Real Peep. Nelson grew up in Arlington and entered art school at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 1990. While studying painting and printmaking at VCU, Matt worked with fabric simultaneously. He started working on his first two-dimensional sewn piece in 1998. A love of American folk art and quilts led him to experiment “painting” with fabric, thus crafting his first 10" x10" square. Two years later, Nelson completed a quilt of 30 squares featuring images pulled from the worlds of music, pop culture and his own life.

Caroline Hwang

Above: Caroline Hwang talks about Dangerous Cargo, images of female figures which explore the danger and miscommunication that happens within personal relationships. Hwang lives and works in Brooklyn New York. Her inspiration steams from hours spent with her grandmother watching and learning about embroidered and quilted works. This homegrown familiarity with her embroidery process contributes to the sense of comfort in her art. In The Thread as the Line Caroline appropriates the shapes of international nautical code/signaling flags. These flags, in their original state, use bright primary colors to communicate between sea ships and the shore. Her works mimic the shapes of these flags, but the colors are subdued to illustrate that communication is not always clear between humans.

Thank you Clarendon Strings for performing opening night!

Analog to Digital Photography: A Discussion with Fine Art Photographers David Applegate and James Steele

2008-03-14T11:42:00.017-04:00

The Ellipse Arts Center was please to welcome back expert fine art photographers David Applegate and Jim Steele for their discussion “Analog to Digital Photography, the State of the Technology.” With over 85 photographers in attendance, most of whom shoot a combination of both film and digital, they discussed photographic technological advances since they last visited the Ellipse Arts Center in 2006.

David and Jim explained how 2 years ago Kodak was the top manufacture of digital cameras while today Canon holds the #1 spot. Since digital cameras keep getting better, faster and cheaper, Kodak has stopped making black and white film and Nikon has limited their production to only two film cameras. Although, film is still available and since the problems that go along with digital photography are not easily solvable, there still remains a major difference between the final results of digital verse film photography.

When making the switch from film to digital there is a large learning curve. Depending on a photographers comfort level with computers, switching to digital can be impediment. Books by Bruce Fraser are a brilliant resource to assist those making the switch.

David and Jim went on to explain that the main thing to remember is that there is “there is no substitute for vision!” Once one has that vision, a photographer should figure out the most appropriate technique to achieve their vision in the final print.

Juror's Talk: A Discussion with David Griffin

2008-03-06T20:51:00.015-05:00

PHOTO 08 Juror, David Griffin, Director of Photography for National Geographic Magazine, spoke to a crowd of over 85 attendees the evening of Thursday, March 6th, 2008 about his experience choosing work for the Ellipse Art Center’s current exhibition, on display through Saturday April 12th.

When selecting work, it was first most important for the photograph’s subject matter to make an emotional connection with David. Second, he was impressed with works that were able to make ‘order out of chaos' and transcend what the average eye sees to discover patterns and rhythms in the world. Third, he choose work in which the photographic technique was ‘transparent,’ meaning that the photo processes the artist used did not distract him from viewing the work.

After these three main ideas, David went on to explain that there is a balance to this criteria and 100 other little things are considered when editing photographs. Moreover, since David’s background is in journalism, his eye is trained to edit for print publications. Thus he is not as concerned with framing and presentation issues.

Above: David’s favorite work in the show was Min Enghauser’s By the Light of the Moon. David was thrilled by how this image made him feel as though he could “see in the dark”. Min, who was present at the discussion explained how she was able to capture the stars in her seascape by exposing her film for 45 seconds.

Below: David talks about Andrew Katona's Tomato.

PHOTO 08 Opening Reception

2008-02-29T12:16:00.033-05:00

The evening of Thursday, February 21st was the opening night for this year’s Mid-Atlantic exhibition, PHOTO 08. An annual event at the Ellipse Arts Center, PHOTO 08 features the works of photographers who live or work in Virginia, West Virginia, Washington D.C. and Maryland. Amateurs as well as professionals were welcomed to share their talent and compete for three Juror’s Choice Awards which were hand selected by the exhibition's Juror David Griffin, Director of Photography for National Geographic. Two Arlington Cultural Affairs Purchase Awards were chosen by Arlington’s Public Art Curator, Welmoed Laanstra. Of the 711 photographs submitted by 365 artists, David Griffin selected 72 photos by 63 photographers for exhibit. Three Photographers had all their work accepted.

Above: David Griffin discusses his top selections and National Geographic background with Robert Farr, Cable Executive Producer of the Arlington Virginia Network.

Below: Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Director, announces the three recipients of the Juror’s Choice Awards and the two Arlington Cultural Affairs Purchase Awards.

The Ellipse would like to congratulate Juror’s Choice Award winners, Frank Lavelle for Morocco # 2, an emotional and mysterious image; Min Enghauser for By the Light of the Moon, Number Two, a dreamy night time landscape; and Colin Winterbottom for Nail Factory, Wheeling, WV, a fast-paced image about the relationship between man and machine.

Winners of the Arlington Cultural Affairs Purchase Awards must be Arlington County resident photographers. Their work will be on display in the permanent collection of Arlington Cultural Affairs’ at the offices of 3700 South Four Mile Run. The Ellipse would like to give special congratulations to Angela Costanzo for her charming vision of childhood, Isabella and Nancy Murphree Davis for Ball’s Crossroads, which captures glimpses of downtown Ballston in antique pastel tones.

Above: David Griffin, with his son Kyle, congratulates Min Enghauser and Colin Winterbottom, winners of one the Juror’s Choice Awards.

Below: Frank Lavelle and his Juror’s Choice Award winning photograph, Morocco #2.

Above: Ellipse Arts Center Volunteer Olivia Pullara and Gallery Assistant, Esther Hidalgo greet over 350 guests throughout the evening!

Below: Arlington based photographer, Jason Horowitz; Arlington Arts Center Director of Exhibitions, Jeffry Cudlin; Arlington Cultural Affairs Public Art Administrator, Angela Adams; and PHOTO 08 Juror, David Griffin enjoy each others company during the opening.

Griffin admits that his deep love of landscape painting and visual interest in texture, color and pattern influenced his decision for the Juror’s Choice Awards. Although there were only a few winners, Griffin would congratulate all of the participating artists. “You should be proud to be making photographs,” he says, “for it is a universal communicator, and one that I believe is critical for increasing understanding and empathy for the differing cultures of our shared worlds.”

Above: Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Ellipse Arts Center Educational Programmer and Kristina Bilonick of the Ballston Virginia Square Partnership discuss lively art happenings within the Ballston, Virginia area.

Miami Basel 07

2007-12-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

With limited time and a countless number of contemporary art fairs to comb through, Arlington Cultural Affairs left snowy DC and headed down to Miami Basel. Above Welmoed Laanstra, Arlington Public Art Curator; Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Director; and Angela Jerardi, Transformer’s Development Associate begin their weekend at the Beautiful Loser’s party on South Beach.

The Beautiful Losers Portfolio is a print collection made up of a loose-knit group of American Artists in the 1990’s who where “influenced by popular underground youth subcultures of the day — skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music.” Artists include Basquiat, Henry Chalfant, Larry Clark, Robert Crumb, Glen E. Friedman, Futura, Keith Haring, Ari Marcopoulos, Raymond Pettibon, Pushead, Craig R. Stecyk III, Andy Warhol, Thomas Campbell, Cynthia Connolly, Cheryl Dunn, Shepard Fairey, Phil Frost, Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, Evan Hecox, Jo Jackson, Todd James, James Jarvis, Any Jenkins, Chris Johanson, Spike Jonze, Kaws, Margaret Kilgallen, Harmony Korin, Josh Lazcano, Geoff McFetridge, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinley, Ryan McGinness, Mike Mills, Os Gemeos, Stephen Powers, Terry Richardson, Clare E Rojas, Rostarr, Ed Templeton and Tobin Yelland.

Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Ellipse Arts Center Educational Programmer; Welmoed Laanstra, Arlington Public Art Curator and Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Director stand in front of a giant bamboo mosaic art mural at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami’s Wynwood Design District.

Above is artwork by Megan Whitmarsh seen at New Image Art in Aqua Hotel on South Beach and below is artwork by Anila Rubiku seen at Nada Art Fair. Both artists will exhibit work in the upcoming Ellipse Arts Center exhibition, THE THREAD AS THE LINE: Contemporary Sewn Art, on exhibit May 2, 2008 through July 12, 2008.

After hours and hours of contemporary art one must never forget the importance kicking back under a Palm tree out side the Nada Art Fair. Five fairs down and a trillion left to cover.

Welmoed Laanstra, Arlington Public Art Curator sits in front of Scope Miami’s Solar Pavilion 2 an installation by Matthew McGuinness, an emerging artist whose work presents alternative and sustainable visions of community in an urban culture, and Situ Studio, a research, design and fabrication practice which operates at the intersection of architecture and a variety of other disciplines.

THE NARRATIVE FIGURE: Opening Night!

2007-11-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

The evening of Thursday, November 8th was opening night for The Narrative Figure: Work by Lee Arts Center Artists, featuring Lisa Clague, Debra Fritts, Carol Owen, Alfredo Ratinoff, Nan Smith and Elizabeth Wolf. Curated by Lee Arts Center Director, Novie Trump, work was chosen by artists who have taught master workshops at the Lee Arts Center.

The Narrative Figure showcases contemporary works in clay and on paper that explore the stories that artists tell with the human form. The range of artistic styles varies from assemblage to terra-cotta sculpture. Some of the pieces utilize deeply personal imagery, while others interpret well-known fictional tales, such as Alfredo Ratinoff’s (right) A Midsummer Night’s Dream series of drawings and plates.

Ellipse Educational Programmer, Lisa-Marie Thalhammer (center), chatting with guests. One of Lisa Clague’s Tattoo Monkeys hangs in the background. Clague’s masked ceramic figures are like citizens of a fantasy world. They challenge the barrier between dreams and reality.

Artist Elizabeth Wolfe (right) and friend, in front of her figurative etchings. Wolfe’s images combine old and new printmaking techniques, along with photographic elements.

Penelope Nunes (left), Director of Educaton of the Arlington Arts Center and guests with Debra Fritts’, Little Bee sculpture in the background. Through sculpture, Fritts uses the female figure to express, “the mysteries and joys of daily life.”

Guests at the buffet table enjoying Toigo Orchard’s fresh apples from the Courthouse Farmer’s Market (which is open year-round!) Carol Owens’ Spirit Houses are displayed behind them. Owen incorporates found objects, special mementos and photographs into each miniature. They are mysterious and charming three-dimensional scrapbooks, which take the viewer back in time.

A view of the gallery through Nan Smith’s porcelain sculpture, Serendipity. Smith creates sentimental vignettes that explore the human consciousness, memories and feminine intuition. She creates timeless statements with poetic themes, where the first piece is as romantic and delicate as the last.

THE NARRATIVE FIGURE: WORK BY LEE ARTS CENTER WORKSHOP ARTISTS OPENS THIS THURSDAY

2007-11-05T17:39:00.000-05:00

THE NARRATIVE FIGURE

WORK BY LEE ARTS CENTER WORKSHOP ARTISTS
Friday, November 9, 2007 – Saturday, January 19, 2008
Closed the week of Thanksgiving and Christmas

CURATOR: Lee Arts Center Director Novie Trump
ARTISTS: Lisa Clague, North Carolina; Debra Fritts, Georgia; Carol Owen, North Carolina; Alfredo Ratinoff, Maryland; Nan Smith, Florida; Elizabeth Wolf, Maryland

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, November 8, 6–9pm

Parking is free and open late the night of the reception

LEE ARTS CENTER WORKSHOPS
Nan Smith: Narrative Figures, Molds and Modeling,
January 11, 12, 13 2008, 9–5pm each day
Elizabeth Wolf: The many Ways to Transfer an Image
March 29 & 30 2008
Visit the Lee Arts Center website for updates: www.arlingtonarts.org/leearts.htm

VISUAL ARTS CAREER ROUNDTABLE: On Tuesday, December 4th Arlington County high school students will visit the Ellipse Arts Center for a panel discussion on careers in the visual arts. The students will also have an opportunity to have their portfolios reviewed by our expert panelists.

IN THE PROJECTION ANNEX: Best of Rosebud Film and Video Festival 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007 – Saturday, January 19, 2008
Calls for entries for 2008 are available at the Ellipse

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTISTS

Photo 08 Call for Entries: Deadline - January 29, 2008! Photographers who live in DC, VA, MD or WV are eligible to enter. Photo 08 will run at the Ellipse Arts Center from February 22 – April 12, 2008. Download the call for entries at http://www.arlingtonarts.org/ellipseartscenter.htm#photo

Uncommon Beauty Call for Entries: Deadline - April 18, 2008! The Ellipse Arts Center and the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran collaboration will be an exhibition of photo and video based works that explore the relative definition of feminine beauty. Curated by Sarah Tanguy. Download the call for entries at http://www.arlingtonarts.org/ellipseartscenter.htm#uncommon

Metamorphosis Art Space Call for Resident Artists: Alison Christ and Bryanne Dade are starting a new art space in Arlington, with five working studio spaces and two galleries. The studios are located at 3213 Columbia Pike, and will be available starting November 1, 2007. For an application, email Alison Christ at alisonmchrist@yahoo.com. http://www.metartshow.com

The Arlington Commission for the Arts grant applications for FY 2009 (July 1, 2008 - June 30, 2009) will be available on the Arlington Arts website mid-November http://www.arlingtonarts.org/cultural_affairs/funding.htm.

About the Ellipse Arts Center

Ellipse Arts Center is a 3,000 square foot visual arts facility managed by Arlington Cultural Affairs located at 4350 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington Virginia 22203 (one block west of the Ballston metro). Gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday 11am-7pm and Saturday 11am-2pm. Our mission is to provide a diverse schedule of high quality programs in the visual arts, providing opportunities for visual artists, as well as developing an engaged and appreciative audience.

This newsletter is provided as a courtesy of Arlington Cultural Affairs. Please forward comments or suggestions to 703-228-7710 or send an e-mail to ellipseartscenter@arlingtonva.us. If you no longer wish to receive emails from the Ellipse Arts Center please unsubscribe.

Shifting Terrain Workshop with Dawn Gavin

2007-10-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

On the morning of October 9th, teams of Arlington County high school students stepped off the bus and into the Ellipse Arts Center to participate in Shifting Terrain, an educational workshop lead by YOU ARE HERE exhibiting artist Dawn Gavin. In her lecture Dawn explained, “maps are static representations of shifting information”, as seen through the eyes of the mapmaker.

She communicated that maps, like real landscapes, can evolve. They change whenever countries form new borders, erosion wears down coastlines or volcanoes create new islands. Dawn showed the students that in art, maps don't have to lead from point A to point B. They can traverse the mind or make a statement about cultural identity.

After a tour of the gallery and Dawn’s insightful lecture, the students had a chance to develop their own freeform collages. Using vintage maps and old atlas books, they formed countries which reflected their unique imaginations. The end results were amazing! The students included 3-D elements, text, animals and even their nametags into the works.

At multiple phases during the collaging process, Dawn took still images of the students' work. Then she demonstrated how to compile these images to create a time based outcome called stop-time animation. Stop-time animation is created by physically manipulating materials (paper, clay or objects) and photographing them one frame at a time. The resulting sequence generates the illusion of movement. The film Wallace and Gromit is an example.

Ellipse Arts Center would like to thank the students and teachers from the following participating schools: Yorktown, HB-Woodlawn, Wakefield and Washington Lee.

Check back later to view the students’ animation!

Project Mobile Ellipse at Clarendon Day

2007-09-29T13:00:00.000-04:00

On September 29th, Project Mobile Ellipse headed to Clarendon Day to Paint the Town with Laura Jane Hamilton. Clarendon Day is a community celebration of art, music and food in Arlington’s original downtown. More than 60 restaurants and 80 vendors set up tents in the ten-block area between the Court House and Clarendon Metro stations.

Our featured artist, Laura Jane Hamilton, developed the idea for Paint the Town, where children and adults could paint miniature facades of local area shops and restaurants like IOTA and Hot Shotz. During the holiday season, the painted cutouts will be hung on the tree as ornaments by the farmers at the Farmer’s Market in Clarendon Central Park. We encourage everyone to come back and see if they can find their piece of artwork once the tree is decorated.

Some of the painted buildings are absolutely adorable, especially the smiling church! Laura Jane and the Ellipse volunteers had a blast mixing up colors and talking with the kids about the places they recognized around Clarendon.

Later that evening, Chance Video-Dances was showcased next to Mexicali Blues Restaurant. In collaboration with Mexicali Blues, Ellipse Arts Center and the Clarendon Alliance, Transformer presented Jane Jerardi’s public-art projections.

Discover Arts: Ballston

2007-09-28T15:08:00.000-04:00

A day of Arts Activities in the heart of Ballston, Virginia!!!
Saturday, October 13th 10am-4pm

Discover what the Ballston neighborhood has to offer on October 13th: visual art, crafts, food, wine and music all in one place! Featuring the Ellipse Art Center, the Ballston Arts & Crafts Market, Grand Cru Wine Store and Willow Restaurant, all within a short walk of each other and easily accessible by Metro (Ballston-MU stop, orange line). Follow the footprints to all of the event locations and discover a wealth of arts, culture and culinary delights in Ballston, Virginia!

Artist Talk
Ellipse Art Center noon-2pm

Featuring artists Julie Jankowski, Renee van der Stelt, Karey Kessler and Dawn Gavin from YOU ARE HERE: Maps Redefined by Mid Atlantic Contemporary Artists. Veggies from the Ballston Farmer's Market and sweets by Willow Restaurant will be served. This is the final day to view this exhibtion 11am-2pm.

Image: art by Dawn Gavin

Ballston Arts + Crafts Market
Welburn Square, 10am-4pm

Over 30 local artists, artisans and indie designers!Live music and swag bags for the first 100 visitors! Welburn Square is located between N. Fairfax Dr. and Wilson Blvd. on N. Stewart Street, across from Ballston Metro Stop.

Wine Tasting
Grand Cru Wine Store 1-3pm
Sample fine wines and discuss wine with the experts! The café opens at 11am and features an array of French and Mediterranean dishes to accompany their extensive wine menu. Shop their wine collection in their attached wine store. Patio seating available. Enter through the Ellipse Plaza. Grand Cru Wine Store and Vineria, 4401 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington Virginia.

Dead Men's Hollow
Welburn Square 2-4pm

This local bluegrass band will perform a free concert at the Arts + Crafts Market at Welburn Square. The Washington Post calls Dead Men's Hollow: "One of our area's most talented traditional acts". Sit on the grass and enjoy the show!

All events are free, open to the public and handicapped accessible.

Discover Arts: Ballston is brought to you by The Ballston-Virginia Square Partnership, The Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington Cultural Affairs, Grand Cru Wine Store and Willow Restaurant! See you there!!!

YOU ARE HERE: Opening Night!

2007-09-06T15:26:00.000-04:00

The evening of Thursday, September 6th was opening night at the Ellipse Arts Center for, YOU ARE HERE: Maps Re-Defined by Mid-Atlantic Contemporary Artists. Curated by Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Director, the exhibition features four talented femme fatales: Dawn Gavin, Julie Jankowski, Karey Kessler and Renee van der Stelt. YOU ARE HERE will be on display through Saturday, October 13. Be sure to stop by on that day to attend our Artist’s Talk from noon - 2:00pm.

YOU ARE HERE subverts the way we ordinarily use and see maps. Maps are man-made subjective representations of how the cartographer views the world. They convey the information required of them through the lens of what is expected of them, their own experiences and cultural influences. In this show, the map then becomes a visual way for the artists to discuss their own perceptions with boundaries and representation.

When thinking of maps, the first thing that usually comes to mind is getting from point A to point B. Not so for Karey Kessler, her paintings travel the realm of her imagination. She focuses on the psychological side to mapmaking, depicting spaces that dissolve through time. Her looping roadways lead to mysterious grasslands, unknown cities and of course, “Tranquility”.

Karey (right) talking with District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC) Director, B. Stanley (left).

Artist Brandon Morse (far right) and other guests view the larger-than-life global cutouts by Renee van der Stelt. On a large table, she placed moveable cutouts in a random pattern so guests could interact with her artwork. She also created eye-popping designs using light shining through pinholes. In the topographical work, Black Hole/Iceberg, Renee’s drawings cross three dimensions, suggesting a tactile landscape as vast as the galaxy.

Julie Jankowski (center) opens a dialog between different views of the natural world. Using satellite imagery, Julie gives us stadiums, magnified views of cities and a dramatic birds-eye view of the 2003 New York blackout. Her American landscapes feature cell phone towers, offering a contemporary twist on the way we see the world.

Guests enjoying some refreshments with Jankowski's Blackout, 23:15 EST 14 Aug. 2003 in the background.

YOU ARE HERE also includes Recticular, a new and intriguing digital video by artist Dawn Gavin (center left). Here she chats with sewn artist, Brece Honeycutt (center right) about the meaning of her work.

Dawn's most stunning piece is Tract, a 48” circular arrangement of paper map fragments attached to the wall on the heads of over 4,000 insect pins - Wow! One thing these ladies have in common is their passion for detail!

Maps are guides for the world between the real and the imagined, what exists and what we want to believe. Dawn uses maps to illustrate the, “space between places”, because even with a map, we never really know where life will take us.

Cynthia certainly dressed for the occasion! Her map tee-shirt, designed by Jessica Zenor, has 48 states on the front and Alaska and Hawaii on the back. Order your own at: http://www.zenorschnitzel.com.

Our wonderful volunteers, Olivia, Frank and Anne, serving it up at the bar. Notice the little maps which tell where the drinks came from! We had wine and lemonade from California and Virginia's finest water straight from the tap!

At the food table, miniature maps stuck out from the cheese, crackers and fresh vegetables. Where do the ingredients for hummus come from? California, Montana, Canada and Java…who knew!

Our gallery assistants had loads of fun cutting out tiny maps. Here is Meggan hard at work.

David Goodman (right), who also works for Arlington County, chatting with a guest. Everyone had a really good time and the food was delicious!

Ellipse Arts Center Education Programmer, Lisa Marie Thalhammer (left) and Kristina Bilonick (right), Art Market Organizer for the Ballston-Virginia Square Partnership, will team up on October 13th for Discover Arts Ballston. A day filled with visual art activities in the Ballston, VA area.

You won’t want to miss the last day to view YOU ARE HERE and hear firsthand from the artists what inspired their interest in mapping. October 13th is also the last Ballston Art Market of the season. The Ellipse Arts Center neighbor, Grand Cru will also be hosting a wine tasting at their new location during these events. Just follow the colorful footprints to find your way!

Grand Cru + Vineria
4401 Wilson Blvd (enter through Ellipse Plaza)
Wine tasting from noon - 4:00pm

Carolina Mayorga Decorates Planet Arlington's World Music Festival

2007-09-01T16:00:00.000-04:00

On September 1st, Planet Arlington's: World Music Festival took place on the Netherlands Carillan/ Iwo Jima Memorial Grounds. It was a day to relax and unwind, celebrate Arlington's rich diversity and listen to some of the world's most acclaimed musicians.

Arlington Cultural Affairs commissioned Carolina Mayorga, an award winning DC-based artist, originally from Bogota, Columbia, to educate and entertain the children during the festival. Her work can be seen in public and private collections, such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Museum of the Americas. She is most famous for "Newspaper Soup" from her 2007 series, New Trends in South American Cuisine, exhibited in E4: Station to Station at Transformer in Washington,DC.

Mayorga's creative fingerprints were all over the Children's Stage. With the theme, Animals of the World, she developed colorful decorations and digitally rendered animal cut-outs.

Carolina Mayorga's creeping praying mantises hung from the trees, which were also on display downtown on 14th Street through Street Scenes. Street Scenes is the brainchild of Nora Halpern and Welmoed Laanstra, Arlington County's new Public Art Curator. Welmoed will continue her vision of bringing art outdoors by, "[stripping] the walls away from exhibitions and collections -- [treating] the entire city as gallery space" through her new job with Arlington County.

Tigers and baboons popped up in the crowd, adding to the festive atmosphere.

At the arts and crafts tables, parents and children could release their inner beasts by making masks of their favorite animals.

These kids really enjoyed getting their hands in the art! They had everything they needed - markers, glue, yarn, animal patterned papers and examples of masks they could draw inspiration from.

Mayorga, with the help of some enthusiastic volunteers, offered face-painting at the festival. Penguins, kittens and elephants were among the most popular choices.

The children modeled their creations and roared with pride, such as these youngsters in their jungle masks. Grrr!

Ellipse Arts Center's Education Programmer, Lisa Marie Thalhammer (far right) chats with young artists. Below they show off their creativity.

Novie Trump (right), manager at the Lee Arts Center, and Sherrie Bartholomew-Whysall (left) lead the children's art program booth.

Music and art lovers from all over the DC Metropolitan area, as well as out-of-towners attended the event. Some even rode their bikes to the celebration. Hopefully, they weren't scared away by all the wild animals!

CO2LED at Planet Arlington: Making a Clean Difference

2007-09-01T15:57:00.000-04:00

On the corner of Ft. Myer Drive and North Lynn Street, there was a traffic island set aglow with light. Using solar-powered LED’s (light-emitting diodes), plastic bottles and flexible poles, artists Jack Sanders, Robert Gay and Butch Anthony successfully turned recyclable materials into an eye-catching public installation. As part of Arlington County’s FreshAIRE campaign (Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions), CO2LED aims to educate Arlington residents about the potential for a cleaner, less polluted future. The exhibit was on display from June 15 through September 1, 2007 during Planet Arlington's: World Music Festival.

LED light is far more energy efficient compared to traditional incandescent bulbs. They illuminate longer, cost less (being solar-powered) and help to eliminate toxic CO2 gas, which is spewed into the atmosphere by power plants that supply our electricity. Power plants burn fossil fuels, LED lights don’t require plants at all. They are self-replenishing. All they really need is the sun. If everyone in the world made the switch today, we could definitely increase our chances of slowing Global Warming.

Saving the environment is on everyone's mind. As festival goers left Planet Arlington, they were able to walk through this public installation piece and read the description about this solar-powered artwork. Once the exhibit is over everything will be recycled.

Brece Honeycutt at Planet Arlington

2007-09-01T14:15:00.000-04:00

On September 1st, Brece Honeycutt was commissioned by Arlington Cultural Affairs to spin wool at Planet Arlington's: World Music Festival. Brece was born in Hickory, North Carolina and makes history-based drawings, sculptures and installations. Honeycutt’s recent exhibitions include Emily Dickinson Rendered at Wave Hill in Bronx , New York; husks at Broadway Windows in New York, NY; silence at Evergreen House (now permanently sited on the grounds of Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore) and at Table installed for two years on the grounds of Longwood University in Farmville, VA.

Her works are often collaborative installations placed in public spaces such as university campuses, historical houses, non-profit spaces and inner-city parks. Currently Brece is spinning yarn in Arlington and recording the memories of fiber, thread and spinning told to her by passers-by.

The results of her experience, including recorded stories and many yards of produced homespun, will be exhibited at The Thread is the Line: Contemporary Sewn Art at Ellipse Arts Center, from May 2 - July 12, 2008. See you there!

The Power of a Cliché: Exhibiting Iran & Representing Women

2007-07-19T19:00:00.000-04:00

On the evening of Thursday July 19th, 2007 the Ellipse Arts Center hosted an educational panel discussion entitled The Power of a Cliché: Exhibiting Iran and Representing Women. Moderated by TRANSFORM/NATION co-curator and Iranian Alliances Across Borders co-founder Narges Bajoghli (left) listens with exhibiting artists Haleh Anvari (center left) and Afarin Rahmanifar (center right) as former ArteEast editor Maymanah Farhat (right) discusses the complications that accompany exhibiting Iranian artists in the West.

TRANSFORM/NATION Opening Night

2007-06-21T23:59:00.000-04:00

On the evening of Thursday, June 21st the Ellipse Arts Center opened its doors to TRANSFORM/NATION: Contemporary Art of Iran and Its Diaspora. This exhibition, sponsored by the Iranian Alliances Across Borders and curated by Narges Bajoghli, Maryam Ovissi, Nikoo Paydar and Leyla Pope, will by on display through August 4th. The gallery will be closed the week of July 4th.

TRANSFORM/NATION artist, Farideh Shahsavarani (Right) standing with a friend, flew from Iran to attend the opening night. According to exhibition curators her six minute video work, Moutra, "deals with fundamental human issues: our relationship to the earth, specially our coming from nature and our conquering it." Farideh Shahsavarani was born in 1955 in Iran. She studied painting at the Faculty of Art & Architecture and is a member of the Graphic Design Faculty at Azad University. She is a member of the 30+ Group and has held twelve individual exhibitions and more than eighty group exhibitions in Iran and abroad.

The crowd converses in front of Haleh Niazmand’s 2002 installation entitled A Stance, made of enlarged fingerprints on acetate and vinyl letters. Haleh states, “in the space between being a Iranian exile and a naturalized American there is no romance. In both positions, I feel a necessity for self-proclamation. In the post 9/11 world, when responsible citizenry here in the US and elsewhere is threatened and the democratic practice, this most coveted American principle, is becoming forgotten, I feel a necessity for voicing ones beliefs and values.”

WOW! What a crowd! The opening had over four hundred in attendance.

Arts patron Jonathan Miller, stands proudly with his recently acquired work by artist Jairan Sadeghi. Self Portrait with Soil Experiments is made of mixed media on paper and “draws ‘conceptually from the idea of [dis]location, migration and ethnic and gender identity.’ ”

TRANSFORM/NATION curator, Narges Bajoghli (Left) is interviewed by Tara Bahrampour from the Washington Post. They lounge on pillows by TRANSFORM/NATION artist, Samira Yamin. In Samira’s work “each piece begins with a printed or painted image on a found scarf of mass manufactured fabric that appropriates a distinctly Middle Eastern aesthetic, but made specifically be Western designers for Western consumption. The printed images are of contemporary war photograghy from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, enlarged, desaturated, cropped and finally framed to complement the scarf, as if it could have been a part of the original pattern.”

From left to right: Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Art Center Director; Nargis Bajoghli, TRANSFORM/NATION Curator and IAAB Co-founder; Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Ellipse Art Center Education Programmer and Nikoo Paydar, TRANSFORM/NATION Curator and IAAB Co-founder.

Curators Statement

Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranians have been in a state of perpetual transition and transformation. The dramatic end of the Shah’s rule, the creation of the Islamic Republic, and the eight year Iran-Iraq war, have all contributed to the creation of one of the fastest growing diasporas in recent history. Nearly 30 years later, in an era dominated by the U.S.-led ‘War on Terror,’ contentious notions of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ and heightened global anxiety over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Iranians in Iran and those outside of its borders are finding themselves in the throes of individual, local, national and global tensions -- they are expressing their experiences and views in new and compelling ways.

Despite living in an environment where self-expression is limited and government censorship is often physically palpable, it is the young people of Iran who are pushing limits and transforming the cultural fabric of their society. Concurrently, Iranians living outside Iran have been grappling with the reality of their dual (and often dueling) identities in their relatively newly-formed hyphenated communities, creating new meanings for diasporic identity and culture.

TRANSFORM/NATION offers the unique opportunity for these culturally related, but geographically separated, communities to interact with one another via simultaneous exhibits in Washington, D.C. and Tehran, Iran. Via photography, paintings, installations, and films by artists from Iran, Europe and the United States, TRANSFORM/NATION brings the individual experience to a global conversation about identity, nationalism, and Iran’s place in the world.

Selection Process

The artists for this exhibition were selected through a Call for Art process. We asked artists of Iranian heritage to address one or more of the following themes: identity, tradition, stereotypes, and society. From over 150 submissions throughout the world, we selected the following artists for the DC exhibition who represent communities across the US, Europe and Iran.

Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) staff and volunteers are thrilled with the positive response to exhibit. Established in 2003, IAAB is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that strengthens the Iranian diaspora community and empowers its youth. www.iranianalliances.org

Social Justice and Printmaking Workshop

2007-05-11T12:38:00.000-04:00

Hand Pulled exhibiting artist Alex Huttinger lead APS middle school students in a workshop that taught the tradition of relief printmaking - an art form which has a rich history of social and advocacy application. Through this workshop, the students generated new ways of thinking and expressing themselves. They visited the Ellipse Arts Center and were given the opportunity to make a drawing themselves. Afterward they visited the Lee Arts Center, where they toured the printmaking studios and completed their prints.

Students visit the Ellipse Arts Center to view the Hand Pulled exhibition and discuss the works of art with Alex Huttinger.

Students are given a tour of the Lee Arts Center's professional printmaking studios.

Artists at work...

Global Warming and pollution were among the many topics the young artists could choose to illustrate. Jessica wrote, "If we don't do something to help the environment plants and animals will die and rivers will be dirty."

Novie Trump, Director of Lee Arts Center (left) and Alex Huttinger, Founder and Director of the Social Justice and Printmaking Workshop (right) review the students' work at the end of the day.

Hand Pulled Opening Reception

2007-04-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

This evening, at the Ellipse we held the opening reception of, Hand Pulled: Juried Mid Atlantic Print Show. The artists and friends came to celebrate the opening. The gallery Director, Cynthia Connolly and the Juror, Joan Boudreau, presented the Juror's Choice awards to Nancy McNamara, Mary Morrison and Norman Strike. Evan Jensen was awarded Honorable Mention and the Arlington County Purchase Award went to Melissa P. Hackman.

Juror Joan Boudreau Visits the Ellipse

2007-03-15T13:00:00.000-04:00

Joan Boudreau selects work for the Mid Atlantic Print Show Hand Pulled, opening Friday April 6. All original fine art print media based work was considered. Boudreau selected from a variety of work including intaglio, relief, lithography, screen printing, photogravure, collagraph, monoprint, photomechanical and digitally "manipulated" prints, non-conventional formats, and dimensional prints.

Ken Ashton visits the Ellipse

2007-02-22T15:30:00.000-05:00

Ken Ashton, 17 year long Corcoran Gallery of Art Technician for Works on Paper, visited the Ellipse Arts Center this evening to present his workshop Presentation 101: How to House Photographs and Works of Art on Paper. This information filled evening taught professional artists the ins and outs of archival framing and storage.

Photo 07' Juror's Talk

2007-02-08T18:22:00.000-05:00

This evening Frank Day gave a talk about his experience as juror of the Photo 07’ exhibition, his jurors statement is posted below.

JUROR’S STATEMENT
It was a pleasure to be back at the Ellipse Art Center performing jury duty...years ago I exhibited in this show, and the award I won from the juror, Corcoran professor Mark Power, was a big thrill. The Ellipse show was a big and important show then, and seems to be even more so now. 235 photographers submitted work this year, and we evaluated 647 pieces to arrive at the final selection of 105 photographs from 79 photographers. I am very happy with the broad range of quality work in the show, from the intensely personal, moving yet technically proficient tribute by John Babineau to his dying mother, “Mother and Son” to the more abstract and cerebral, such as J. Brooke Chao’s “Variety is the Spice of Life” and Jim Burkholder’s “Barn/Flag”. The show also covers the full range of contemporary photographic practice from the political, Steven Melkisethian’s “Protecting the Nation’s Capital from Photographer’s” and David Moss’ “We’re not Criminals” to tongue-in-cheek avant-garde playfulness of Brightside Pictures’ “Lady Fair”. The show also covers the gamut from straightforward representation to fictional spaces created in a computer, for example the captivating image of oriental carp by Tom Kochel.

Deciding upon the three Juror's Awards was difficult, but less so in the case of Allan Hockett, whose beautiful prints squarely in the traditionalist vein are both a testimony to a lifetime of achievement in photography and a reminder of how compelling "old school" black and white photography can be...no "flavor of the month" conceptual conceits, no gimmicks, just mastery and perfection. The same applies to the visually arresting nighttime image by S. Sean Khamphouang; it is mysterious, evocative, and beautifully done. During breaks in the jurying process I found myself wandering over to admire the image “End Point” by Ibi Henrichs; its rich vocabulary of pattern and texture, the grid shapes, the horizontal lines, the curves of the railing, the iconographic content of the text and symbols painted on the building, and the muted but interesting color rewarded repeated viewing.

A considerable number of photographs submitted for consideration were great images I would have loved to jury into the show, but were displayed so poorly in marginal frames that they were clearly not exhibition-ready. The Ellipse annual regional photography show is probably the most significant show of its kind in the area, and work needs to look like it has been presented with some forethought and care. That doesn't rule out innovative approaches, some of which can be seen in this show, but it does rule out drugstore frames, badly cut mats, prints coming loose from their mounting, and so forth.

I would like to thank Cynthia and Lisa and their multitude of energetic volunteers for their help in working through the daunting number of submissions, and for their patience in the closing hours when we had to make the most difficult final cuts so the show would actually fit on the walls. It would be great to have bigger walls, but you have to mount the exhibition with the walls you have, not the ones you would like to have.

JUROR’S BIOGRAPHY
Frank Hallam Day has been active as a fine art photographer in Washington DC for many years. He has taught photography at Photoworks, at the Washington Center for Photography, and at the Smithsonian. His work is in numerous museum and private collections in the United States and abroad. He has also received a number of important grants and museum commissions, and his work has repeatedly been selected for inclusion in the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran and Transformer fundraising auctions, and has just been selected for the Print Collectors Program at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. His recent photographic interests include an extensive body of work on the erasure of personal and social memory in East Berlin, and an even larger body of work on the many ramifications of globalization for African economies and African identity. His exhibition of Berlin photographs at Addison/Ripley Fine Art was picked by the Washington City Paper as the photography show of the year in the Washington area for 2004. He also writes on photography for the Photo Review.

Photo 07 Opening

2007-02-01T19:02:00.000-05:00

The Photo 07 show opened Thursday, February 1, 2007 with a huge success. 647 photos were submitted by 235 people. Frank Hallam Day, a fine art photographer from Washington DC, juried the show. The show now consists of 107 photographs by 79 photographers. Three merit awards of $500 each were given along with one purchase award.

S. Sean Khamphouang's Highland Estate, 2000, was awarded the Arlington county purchase award along with the Juror's choice award.

Allen Hockett (left) and Frank Day (right) pose for a picture after Hockett received his Juror's choice award for his photographs Store, KS,1993 and 1832 Longwood Way Station, MO, 1997.

End Point, 2004 by Ibi Hinrichs (above) won a Juror's choice award.

Conversions artist, Joan Sarah Wexler (left) chats with juror Frank Day (right) about her inclusion in the Photo 07' show.

Ellipse Arts Center Intern, Laura Brooks, a photography student at the Corcoran College of Art and design received photographs and helped Frank during the jury process.

We had a very successful turnout. Over 450 people gathered to view the photographs and to support their friends and family members in the show.

Yummy! Check out all the good food we had. There was cheese from Wisconsin, crackers and apples.

After the awards were announced the Clarendon Strings, Amy Domingues on Cello and Maurice Gatewood on Violin, serenaded the audience.

Martine and Anne, two other Ellipse Arts Center volunteers helped the night move smoothly.

Frank Day (left), Ellipse Arts Center volunteer Mark Charette (right) and friend enjoy the opening.

ELLIPSE STAFF DC BIKE TOUR

2006-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

On December 20th Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Director, and Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Ellipse Arts Center Educational Programmer, took an all day bike tour around DC to various art galleries around town. This outing sparked the initial planning of an Arlington County Arts Bike Tour (which Cynthia is currently mapping out).

The ladies started out in Georgetown at Addison/Ripley Fine Art before heading to District Fine Arts where Cynthia Connolly’s photographs were on display.
www.addisonripleyfineart.com
www.dfaonline.com

Next the Ellipse Staff headed up town to the Katzen Center at American University where they saw an array of interesting exhibitions.
www.american.edu/academic.depts/cas/katzen/index.cfm

Darn no bike parking…

Flying back down Mass Ave Lisa Marie stops to view the beautiful scenery over Rock Creek Park before heading to one of the Ellipse staff’s favorite arts destinations, Provisions Library located in Dupont Circle.

“Provisions is a social change learning resource amplifying compelling voices that challenge and redefine the mainstream. Provisions places great value on the power of the arts - literature, visual art, new media, theatre, music - to speak across national and cultural boundaries and provide a critical lens through which to see the world”.
www.provisionslibrary.org

Then the ladies headed to 7th Street to visit the Warehouse Arts Complex where Civilian Art Projects launched its new program with the exhibition Dynamic Field. Lily Cox-Richard’s mixed media installation below entitled Red Roofed Bungalow was a favorite.
www.warehousetheater.com
www.civilianartprojects.com

Who doesn’t want to consume at the Flashpoint art gallery? Curated by Angela Jerardi, this “exhibition consume invited viewers to consider the nuance and ambiguity inherent in our concepts of consumption—and what, how, and why we consume”.
www.flashpointdc.org

Above Cynthia holds the consume price list where one could find artwork ingredients.

A DC bike tour would not be complete with out a stop at 1515 14th Street. Cynthia and Lisa Marie definitely enjoyed the captivating work of Washington DC artist iona rozeal brown at G Fine Arts.

The Ellipse Staff then ended their bike tour at Transformer, an artist centered non-profit located at 14th and P Streets NW.
www.transformergallery.org

Transformer's DC based artists Rachel Waldron (above) and Ryan Nelson (below) discuss their installation of new drawing and prints.

Roundtable Report

2006-11-17T11:53:00.000-05:00

Yorktown, Woodlawn, Wakefield and Washington-Lee High School art students visited the Ellipse Arts Center on Wednesday, November 15th for the Visual Arts Career Roundtable, a panel discussion on careers in the visual art.

55 Students in the morning session and 25 students in the afternoon session learned from professionals about how visual arts and elements are the primary focus in a multitude of career choices. This years panelists included the following: Veronica Jackson, Principal and Senior Exhibit Designer for the Jackson Design Group; Vida Russell, a print and graphic designer; Stevens Jay Carter, a Washington DC based artist and 2006 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award and Victoria Reis, Executive Director of the non-profit emerging visual arts space Transformer.

After the seminar was completed the students had the opportunity to have their portfolio reviewed and talk personally with our expert panelists. Denise Phalan, Yorktown art teacher and All Arlington Salon exhibiting artist said that when her students returned to school they were so inspired that they choose to paint while eating lunch!

All Arlington Salon Show 2006 Opening

2006-11-10T12:01:00.000-05:00

This year in the All Arlington Salon, 96 works of art are being exhibited from 76 artists. These works were selected from over 454 entries submitted by 191 artists.

Carlo Biggio stands in front of his self portrait that has just won one of the three Juror's Choice Awards.

Juror Andrea V. Uravitch states, "As in any survey show, there was a diverse grouping of technique, subject matter, materials, schools or art and capabilities. I looked at each piece carefully, and tried to understand what the artist was representing… The only trend I could detect was artists re-exploring different time period art. A personal contemporary spin was then put on the work. "

A crowd of over 350 people attended the opening, all greatly anticipating the announement of the Juror's Choice Awards.

Bud Hensgen stands next to his painting Bridge Near St. Michaels.

Cecily Corcoran, Ellipse Arts Center volunteer, stands next to her piece in the show, Here's Looking at You.

Photographer Frank W. Beach Jr. with his digital photograph Strollers on Piha Beach.

Arlington artist Monica Stroik with her piece City of Angels.

Henrik Sundqvist wins one of three Juror's Choice Awards for one hundred dollars for his piece in the show titled, Riyaila in Tucson.

Project Mobile Ellipse: Visiting Artist Series

2006-09-22T16:33:00.000-04:00

As part of Project Mobile Ellipse, Conversions artist Susan Eder presented slides of her photographs and discussed her work this afternoon to Yorktown High School art students.

Susan Eder brought her experience as a working artist and teacher of fine art for eleven years in the New York and Massachusettes college systems, to the Yorktown classroom. Since 2001 Eder has collaboratively photographed unusual aspects of common subjects. By recording what is available to the attentive eye, her work expands upon the viewer's own everyday experiences.

"It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious"
-Alfred North Whitehead

Conversions Artists' Talk

2006-09-22T12:07:00.000-04:00

Last night Conversions' artists discussed their work with an enthusiastic public.

Renee Butler quotes Virginia Woolf to describe her piece Movement in B Flat. “Life is a Luminous Halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Susan Eder stands in front of her work Which Image Never Fades Away?, which was made in collaboration with artist Craig Dennis. These photographs of letter-shaped cloud formations "illustrate the universal human tendency to perceive meaning in abstract shapes."

Amy Glengary Yang's Phosphor series – cyanotypes mounted in lightboxes - stems from a “recent resurgence in both alternative photographic processes and figurative art… [She has] returned to processes that are created entirely by hand and require a labor-intensive methodology.” Yang states that, "Phosphorbox, in particular, also uses a human-scaled mirrored box to refract the lightbox glow in a way that multiplies and confuses the images, and supports an assemblage of totemic sculptural elements: an antique bell jar with pressure apparatus and a sea urchin skeleton lit with a neon element. The use of lightboxes also creates a juxtaposition between cyanotyping, an antique process that predates electricity, and fluorescent lights ---- an omnipresent and symbolically charged modern fixture. The drawn figures themselves are rendered using a contour technique. This hyper-emphasizes the flatness of the image in a way reminiscent of silkscreen or woodcut prints, postmodern anime-inspired art, and other forms of art that place an emphasis solely on the contour line."

Kathryn Cornelius’ work responds to the spaces left between what is said and what is silent. She is concerned with addressing common, overlooked behaviors and collective emotional states that cross cultural boundaries and link individuals in ways that are outside the polarizing polemics of politics, ethnicity, race and class. To explore these themes, she extracts her material from the everyday and employs traditions of performance art, mixed with the methods and subversive agenda of conceptual art. Many of the works utilize repetitive examples of black humor and irony as devices to push perceived levels of comfort and open channels toward reflection and self-awareness. Through the use of video, photography, installation, sound, and sculpture, Cornelius aims to achieve a form through which the viewer can undergo a loss of time in the exploration of universal concepts hidden within the thin lines of purpose that attach us to histories, traditions, and social identities. The intention is to let go of the skin and surface, and slip into a state of challenging silence.

M. Sedestrom Guthrie talks to the public about her photographic series Through the Glass. This body of work documents the graceful passage of time between a window washer and the artist at her day job.

Street Scenes at the Ellipse Arts Center

2006-09-15T14:44:00.000-04:00

Art Not Ads, the premier project of an ambitious new public arts program called Street Scenes, launched today at the Ellipse Arts Center. Street Scenes: Projects for DC has been established by local independent art curators to mount temporary public art interventions in and around the DC area. The mobile billboards will be outfitted with banners and high-resolution video displays that will showcase paintings, drawings, video art and poetry from internationally and locally known artists. This project was sponsored in part by Arlington Cultural Affairs, Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources. For more information on this project please visit www.streetscenesdc.com.

DC artist Ian Whitmore, displayed his work on both sides of a mobile billboard, where ads would usually be seen. The mobile billboard drove around Arlington County this afternoon, before it headed into the District.

“Layers factor into Whitmore’s work in image and context. Inspired and informed by the language of art history, Whitmore creates a horizontal sense of movement by referencing paintings by Washington Color Field masters Morris Louis and Gene Davis. Over this imagery, he places such humorous representational imagery as an elephant and apple. Finally, he takes a mop of colors to the whole work.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator

Whitmore used mud as a medium on top of his billboard sized image.

As the sun set in Arlington County, the Street Scenes video truck prepared to launch into the metropolis. Video art by Colby Caldwell, Brandon Morse, Jose Ruiz and Conversions artist Kathryn Cornelius could be seen as the truck cruised around Arlington County on Friday evening.

“Brandon Morse’s digital work, non sequiter, 2006 (8 minutes) is a colorful play of movement, reminiscent of computer game images and film effects. Interested in work that is ‘situated somewhere between a specific narrative and a non-event,’ non sequiter moves through its sequence with one shape influencing the movement of the whole. As pedestrians and cars interact around the piece, the artwork will serve as a prism-like mirror to its city environs.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator

“In another twist on language and image, Jose Ruiz presents wifebeater, 2006 (3:55 minutes). Referencing a slang term for the undershirt made famous by Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowolski in A Streetcar Name Desire, Ruiz presents us with a T-shirt seen hanging in a kitchen, filled with a ball and continuously being punched and left swinging. The machismo usually connoted by the garment is ironically bled away in this depiction.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator

CONVERSIONS OPENING NIGHT!!!

2006-07-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

Conversions jurors and renowned collectors Heather and Tony Podesta share a smile with Judy Jashinsky.

Juror and venerable DC artist Sam Gilliam looking dapper with the equally stylish Clark of Moca.

Conversions artist Tai Hwa Goh enjoying the limelight in front of her work entitled Lull. The Intaglio process was applied to each hand-waxed piece, creating an ambiguous space where the abstract and figurative merge, and where the delicate markings belie an almost nightmarish logic.

What would the opening be without the hard work of gallery assistant Antonio Mcafee and volunteer Frank Higgins? Lisa Kellner's gorgeous work Oil Spill, made of yellow quilting pins on a portable wall is illuminated in the background.

Art & Embassies head and independent curator, Sarah Tanguy, takes a break from her busy schedule to enjoy the show.

Ding Ren, WPA\C Program Director, and Steve Frost, Corcoran Admissions Conselor, are all smiles in front of Tomas Rivas' piece.

Conversions artist Tomas Rivas enjoying a laugh with his viewers. His ongoing investigation of the representation of space addresses the complexity of art production today, where the "center" and the "periphery" vie for political clout within the mainstream.

Tony Podesta and Kim Ward, director of the WPA\C, discuss the finer points of Amy Glengary Yang's piece, Phosphor Box. Yang's inspiration for her "Phosphor" series comes from the recent resurgence in both alternative photographic processes and figurative drawing. Phosphor Box uses a human-scaled mirrored box to refract the lightbox glow in a way that multiplies and confuses the images, and supports an assemblage of totemic sculptural elements. Discuss away!

Ellipse Education Programmer Lisa Marie Thalhammer takes part in a lively conversation. Sadly, the opening must end, but not after first declaring it a smashing success with over 300 people in attendance!

OPEN WEAVING WITH ELIZABETH MORISETTE

2006-05-25T12:29:00.000-04:00

Arlington Public School Students add to Elizabeth Morisette's Looming Loom. Fabric, rubber bands, and toothbrushes are just a few of the items that bring the work of art to vibrant life. Free to decorate as they saw fit, these creative kids just had to remember four things...over under, over under!

"ART & HEALING" SEMINAR WITH RICHARD BAY

2006-05-05T17:53:00.000-04:00

Junkyard artist Richard Bay, Assistant Professor of Art Education at Radford University, workes with Arlington County Art Teachers.

FROM THE JUNKYARD TO THE FRONTYARD OPENING RECEPTION

2006-05-04T14:36:00.000-04:00

Ellipse Arts Center openned From the Junkyard to the Frontyard, an exhibit that will help redefine our conception of junk, on Thursday. According to Director/Curator Cynthia Connolly "although we often assume there is only the one common use for everything manufactured, this exhibit exposes the ingenuity of five artists who take found, free or very inexpensive materials and transform them into beautiful peices of art, rendering the "junk" unrecognizable in the process."

Director Cynthia Connolly (right) chats with artist Margaret Boozer (left) at the openning reception.

Junkyard artists Richard Bay (right) and Carolyn Bernstein (left) discuss Richard's Art.

Junkyard artist Jeff Willson shows off his tie made with recycled lids.

Arlington County Mechanic and Junkyard artist George Kakissis discusses his work with viewers.

We had a devil of a good time!